From the course: Black-and-White Darkroom: Printing Techniques

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Creating a burn mask

Creating a burn mask

From the course: Black-and-White Darkroom: Printing Techniques

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Creating a burn mask

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- In this image, like the previous one, I wanted to expose for the foreground information. I thought that, that would be harder to change in a burn, and I let the sky go white so this would be perfect. Unlike the last image, however, we're dealing with a more complex horizon line here. I don't want to add any exposure to the nose cone from the mother ship here. We're going to create what's called a burning mask to selectively block the light that would hit the foreground when we make our burn. This would be comparable to doing a levels adjustment, where you carefully made a mask and made a selection to do your gradient burn. Now that we've looked at our work print and made a decision about what we want to do, let me show you how to make a burning mask. I'm back at the enlarger and you can see I've got the negative properly positioned. I've pulled out the contrast filters and opened the iris back up so I can see this more clearly. I'm going to place a little spacer in there and then…

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