is there any way to use the burn and dodge tools so that they aren't biased to highlight, mid and shadow but treat all values the same.perhaps a plug-in or just a way to set them in photoshop.it would be so cool, it would be the ultimate tool, you just draw the outline, fill your texture and than give them form with those two tools,and yet.......it doesn't quite work that well when the texture is very pronounced

hi burn and doge lighten and darken, and in their specific case, they lighten or darkend the assigned density (highlight or shadow). an easy overall way to lighten or darken an image is in the curves menu codec3

hey, I almost forgot about this post, what i mean is not to lighten ordarken an image, but using these tools as a painting tool, lets say you weremaking a tree from scratch, you could draw the outline with the lasso, fill it with a generic bark texture and than use the burn and dodge tool to make shadows and form and so on, however I've tried this many times and because one area of the texture may be more of a mid and another is a high it goes all weird, can thee tools be altered so they aren't so biased, so the burn tool will adjust the high and mid areas all at once?

Sure there is. Make one adjustment layer that lightens, and one that darkens. Paint on either layer just like you would a layer mask. Fill both layers with black to start out, then paint in white to allow the adjustment to be applied to your image. Got this technique from the PhotoShop 5.5 WOW! book, one I recommend highly.

Just to prove that there are two or three ways to acheive any task in PhotoShop, I present part two of Burn and Dodge: If your image is color, Make a new layer over your image and change the blend mode to Overlay. Paint in white to dodge and black to burn. These two methods produce different results, so try both. Using two separate layers, one set to screen and one set to multiply may work better.

BTW, when I say "paint", I mean painting with the brush tool. The burn and dodge tools have limited utility, IMHO.

thanx for the technigues, photoshop always as a new trick up its sleeve

While your working with the dodge and burn tool you can alter it as you go over partucular areas of the texture by using the shortcuts. Alt+shift+w=Shadows Alt+shift+v=Midtones Alt+shift+z=Highlights This gives a bit more variation in the shading. I think one of the main problems is that texture fills dont follow the contours of the object and so look a bit false from the outset. There is a very good artist at the below link who uses a kind of combination of Dodge,Burn & Smudge to amazing effect, You may want to check him out if you havn,t already seen his site.He has a tutorial up. http://www.sijun.com/dhabih/