Curves vs. Levels: What's the Difference? | Photoshop

today i'm going to show you the difference between curves and levels in photoshop hey there and welcome to phlearn my name is aaron nace you can find me at phlearn.com where we make learning fun and in this video we're going over two of the most commonly used tools for adjusting things like exposure as well as color in photoshop and these are curves and levels now most of the things that you do can be done with levels but sometimes you want to bring in curves so you can get a little bit more control let's go ahead and jump into photoshop and show you how both of these tools work so here's our sample image you can actually download this on phlearn.com so you can follow along now to start off with we're going to go to layer down to new adjustment layer and we're going to go to levels there we go let's go ahead and hit ok and we're going to go to layer down to new adjustment layer and i'm going to go down to curves and hit ok so we have a curves and a levels adjustment layer now let's go ahead and take a look at these two before we start so we can see here with our levels we have a chart right here it starts off high on the left hand side and kind of goes down to the right hand side now this is actually our histogram of our image we can go to window and then down to histogram to see our full histogram including color information and we can see we have a spike on the left and you can see it starts to go down as we go to the right hand side now what this tells us is that we have more information on the dark side of our image so the left is for darks and the right is for light so there's a lot more dark here than there is light and that makes sense right we can just look at our image and tell yep there's a lot of dark information in our image and not a whole lot of light information okay now here with curves we get the same thing it's kind of stretched vertically but we can see a spike for the dark information and there we go all the way to the light information so basically both of these are displaying our histogram which is the light and color information of our image now some other similarities here if i go to my levels you're going to see i have three different eye droppers that i can use and if i go to my curves i also have access to those three different eyedroppers i got a couple more that's why curves a little bit more complex but let's show you around what those eyedroppers do let's go ahead and close out my histogram now my eyedropper will allow me to choose my black point my midpoint and my white point so if you have an area that you want to be completely black let's go ahead and do that i'm going to click my black point here we're going to click on something that i actually want to be black there we go just that top left corner we're going to do the same thing with my white point here and we'll just zoom in and click on that i want that to be actually white and then my midpoint will which will actually help white balance our photo as well so i can click here on this target neutral gray and you can see it helps the white balance if i were to click on this red it would try to compensate by making my image cyan or if i click on this yellow it tries to compensate by making my image blue okay so make sure if you're using your midpoint your gray point you want to click on an actual gray area and that's going to help you white balance so you can see just with a couple of different eyedroppers i'm able to let's just turn this off and on color correct and exposure correct my photo okay and the same exact tools are available for you here in curves and they work in the same exact way okay now let's say you don't want to use the eyedroppers you want to use these control points and you want to do things a little bit more manually that's fantastic so let's go ahead and reset this now with these control points i'm going to choose my black point so i can click here and drag this from the left to the right and what this is going to do keep in mind i have all this information here it's going to take all of this information that's to the left of this point and make it completely black so as i keep going more in my image is just becoming completely black on the other side i can make more of my image completely white there we go and here on the midpoint i can make my middle pixels either darker or i can make them lighter and don't forget you can use all three of these in combination with each other if you want let's go ahead and reset that now here on the bottom i have my output levels what this is going to do is take my darkest point and make it lighter okay we can take our lightest point and make it darker now you can use these all in combination with each other so if i want more blacks but i don't want the blacks to be as dark i can do this i can go ahead and pull my midtones a little bit lighter i can make my highlights a little bit brighter and i can make my highlights just simply not all the way white so there's a lot that we can do here now all of these things that we've done so far have just been in rgb which is a combination of a red green and blue channels okay so this is not color correcting at all we're just exposure correcting but i can actually correct my colors by clicking on rgb and editing my individual color channels my red channel green channel and blue channel so let's just jump into our red channel to show you how this works you have the same sliders but here you're going to be pulling the reds out of the darks and it's going to replace them with cyans you're going to be adding red to your highlights here there we go and here you can choose your mid tones it's going to push to the right is going to be pulling reds out which is going to be cyan so cyan and red are opposite of one another there we go and here we can see i can add red to my shadows and take away red from my highlights now this can be relatively tough to color correct your image because like you know who knows what you know okay there we got a lot of different sliders here right so it's you want to use these relatively subtly and i usually use these for more like color toning rather than color correction all right let's go ahead and hit undo there it's going to just reset everything we still have our green channel to go over so this is going to be more magenta or more green and let's go ahead and reset this go to our blue channel we're going to have more yellow or more blue so those are basically the opposite so red and cyan are opposites we have green and magenta as opposites and we have blue and yellow as opposites so there we have our levels adjustments and as i mentioned levels are a little bit more simplified and they do the job very well most of the time now if you want a little bit more control that's when it's time to use curves so let's go ahead and take a look at these points here in our levels and see how they relate to curves so we're going to start off with our black point here you can see it simply makes more my image black now here in my curves that's going to be right here i can take my black point and it's going to make more my image black so with levels my white point making more of my image white that's all right over here white point making more of my image white you can see it looks the exact same thing okay now here i have a middle point that i can make my midtones lighter or darker now with curves you actually use that midpoint yourself you can click here and drag it up to make your middle areas lighter or down to make them a little bit darker okay next with our levels we have our output levels making our darks not as dark and here in curves i can do that by simply grabbing this white point and dragging it up so i'm making my darks not as dark with our levels i can make my lights not as light and i can do the same thing here with curves making my lights not as light okay i also have control over each of my individual color channels so rgb red green and blue so now we can see just go back to our levels here we can change our individual color channels we've got five different points that we can slide around and we've got our eye droppers so all of those different tools are accessible here with curves as well so we can see that curves allows you to do everything the levels does but we have even more control so let's go ahead and jump in and show you how that works i want to start off with this tool right up here at the very top because i think this is a very helpful tool for using curves basically this tool allows you to not have to worry about this graph at all you can simply focus on your image now you can see as i'm moving the little eyedropper tool around my image it's changing my little point here on the graph if i go to a lighter area it's going to go onto the right hand side if i go to a darker area it's going to go to the darker side so what this is allows me to do is simply drag up or down and it's going to make these areas lighter or darker and the reason it's doing lighter or darker is because we have rgb selected which is a combination of my red green and blue channels okay so let's just say i want to make my darks a little bit lighter i'm going to go ahead and click here and just drag that up which is going to make my darks lighter now we say oh that's cool but it made this area a little bit too light so i want to make it darker so i'm going to click here and we'll just make that a little bit darker fantastic now these midtone areas here with our subject skin i want to make that lighter i can make this a little bit lighter and there we go we're starting to look pretty good so what i did with this tool right up here this little hand with the up down arrow it's basically creating each of these individual points along my curve's adjustment now i can still move any of these points that i want to if i want to do some fine tuning here not a problem i can come in and do that right here but you can see what we've got in this case is 1 two three four different points along the middle of our curve now this is why it's a little bit more advanced than levels because with levels i only have one point and i can't add any points it's simply where do you want this little point to be but i couldn't say i want it you know right here a little bit brighter and right here a little bit darker i don't have that level of control but i do have that level of control with curves now i can do the same thing with my different colors so if i go to my red channel and i want to say you know what let's use our little hand tool because in my opinion this hand tool is a fantastic place to start especially if you're beginning i want to say you know what i want a little bit more red in my subject's skin so i can click here and just drag up and that's going to bring a little bit more red into my subject's skin and if i don't want as much red in the shadows i can just drag that down i can go to my green channel and say i want a little bit less green there we go in my subject skin and my blue channel i want a little bit less blue in our subject's skin as well so i'm simply able to target that light range and then make adjustments from there so doing that i was able to not only affect the exposure but also the color of my image you can see here in the before my subject had a little bit of a green tint to her skin and in the after we're able to color correct that tint giving our subject's skin a little bit more proper color i'm going to go ahead and create another one to show you these additional tools but i want to keep this one on here because i think we did a nice job color correcting so let's go ahead and grab another curve adjustment layer we'll show you these additional tools so we've gone over the hand tool we've gone over each of the eyedropper tools now this tool just simply denotes that we can click on any one of these points here and make adjustments as we'd like again in my opinion it's more helpful to use this hand tool because it's kind of hard to visualize here and as we can see we've done quite a bit but if you want to you can just simply grab these points and drag them up or down now our next tool comes with the pencil tool and this basically allows you to paint your own curved line which is really cool if i want to go up right here or maybe put a point up there you can really start to do whatever you want uh there we go and you can kind of rough it in so if you want to say i want my darks to be darker and my lights to be lighter you can kind of rough that in or if you want your darks to be lighter and your lights to be darker you can kind of rough that in as well now our next point here basically just allows you to kind of smooth that out so if i click here it's just smoothing that out so it's going to smooth out whatever i draw so if i go whoa crazy here i can just click and smooth that out to get it a little bit more how i'd want it you can see i still have my white points over here and my black point is over here so i can go back here and move those points if i want to and don't forget you can hit reset at any point in time so basically each of your eyedropper tools plus you have your curve tool and your pencil tool now curves also has an auto so if i just click on auto here there we go in this case i think it's actually done a really nice job as you can see with levels adjustment we also have an auto as well so that's a really good place to start and then you can make some changes from there now in this case i think that's done a really good job but let's say i want to go ahead and do a little bit more color correction this is where i could simply go to my green channel okay grab my little hand tool and i could pull down the greens in my subject's skin there we go i could go to my red tool pull down the reds just a tiny bit it's allowing more cyan and pull down the blue just a tiny bit so at the end of the day it does not matter which one you use they're both great tools curves will allow you a little bit more control while levels keep things nice and simple so my suggestion would be find whichever tool kind of clicks for you a little bit better whatever makes sense as far as layout and go from there but when using the curves adjustment layer make sure to click on that hand icon it's a total game changer and it makes it much easier to use thank you so much for watching i really hope you enjoyed today's tutorial go ahead and click on that subscribe button and the notification bell we'll send you a free tutorial every single week and if you're ready to take a deep dive into photoshop and learn about things like compositing different photos together as well as retouching check out phlearn pro we have a link in the description right down below with an exclusive discount code thanks again i'll phlearn you later bye everyone

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 77,415

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, Adobe Photoshop, Class, Course, Learn Photoshop, photoshop curves, curves vs levels, photoshop levels, how to use curves in photoshop, control contrast with curves and levels, whats the difference between curves and levels, color grading, adjustment layer, photoshop tutorial for beginners, adobe photoshop (software), photoshop curves and levels, photoshop curves vs levels

Id: bRoc9bJ52nA

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020