How to use Curves in Photoshop

hello this tutorial is going to be about using curves in Photoshop so using curves in Photoshop is a really powerful tool and it's something that can be quite daunting for people but it gives great control over tones and colors and highlights and shadows and I can promise you now that once you've done this tutorial you'll be using curves for pretty much every one of your images so here we go this is the image that we are going to use and it's a picture that I took down in the new forest and we're going to adjust it so that it looks like this just by using curves you can see all of my curves layers down here so first of all you really want to use curves adjustment layers because that gives you an opportunity to adjust the layers as you go you can use curves directly on the image but that's called a destructive move by using adjustment layers they're called non-destructive moves because they don't destroy the original photograph so down the bottom here you've got a little icon that you click on and you want to select curves here and it will bring up these properties curves properties box here so let's take you around this box first of all to show you what everything does now over here are these little eye droppers and they are to find your black spot or your grey spot or your white spot now what that actually means is that if I click on this one here which is to find a white spot and that's if the color balance of your image is out so let's say for instance that you forgot to turn your white balance from flesh to daylight and it's coming out a little bit blue what you would do is you will find an area on your image that's white and you'll click on that image I'm just going to use the sunset for now you will click on that image and it will balance your whole picture to that area of white if you haven't got white in the image then you can use the black one find a bit of black in your image and the same for the gray point here now my image was shot correctly so I'm just going to use this reset button here and bring it back down to normal the next thing I'm going to show you is this drop-down box here which allows you to separate your image into certain colors at the moment it's set to RGB which means that that's the whole image every single color in your image but if you click on this drop-down arrow you can select just the Reds just the greens just the Blues and also the colors that are opposite to red and blue etc but I'm going to come back to that in a minute so let's not worry about that for now the next thing to show you is this preset drop-down box here now Photoshop has given you lots of different presets that you can use and it would probably be worth you playing around with this because you might like the cross process look there for example we're going to use it manually so we're not going to be doing that the next thing to show you is this little pencil here now this pencil here will enable you to manually draw a curve over the image it's very rarely used and I'll show you for why in a minute I'm going to just going to reset there and I'm going to select back to this one here the next thing I want to show you is how to adjust the brightness of your picture and it's just these points down here these arrows down here this your black point over here and this is your white point over there that works like levels if you know how to use levels in Photoshop that works just like your levels the next thing to take note of is this little graph here which is your histogram and you can have your histogram again in RGB and in the separate colors I'm going to come to that again in a minute and then lastly the most important thing in is this line here and this is your curved line which you can push up and you can push and you can pull down up making it brighter going down making it darker let's just reset it and put it back in the middle for now okay the first thing to remember when it comes to using curves is this top right box is for highlights pushing it up these are your highlights pushing it up and down you're controlling your highlights this bottom left box here is for your shadows or your dark points like this now the first thing to understand is that because that really enables you to control the highlights and the shadows within your picture so now let's put a curve into this image and we're going to put in the famous s-curve if you don't know what an s-curve is it's one of the best curves that you can use in Photoshop and I can assure you that you'll be putting s curves into nearly every one of your pictures and all you do is you push your highlights up here you pour your shadows down here and it creates this s-shaped curve and if I just go back to the original and then that's the bottom of the curve in you can see the difference straight away it's giving you much more contrast giving you deeper tones stronger highlights and a nice s-curve is something that you could put into nearly every one of your pictures and make it look better once I put me s curve in I am going to close this box and I'm going to add another curves adjustment layer which is down here click on the curves adjustment layer but this time we're going to look at separating the picture in two colors and that is through this drop-down box here if I click the arrow I can select the rate just the reds in the picture so pushing up will increase the Reds pulling down or pull the Reds out now what that actually does is adds tsiyon so you've got first of all trying to remember that pushing up ads Reds pulling down ads the color cyan now the next thing is to think about your highlights and your shadows so I've got a nice sunset here and I want to add some Reds into that sunset the sunset is a highlight so I'm going to push the Reds up in the highlight box now what you can see in the image is I've now got reds everywhere so I'm going to pull the Reds out of the shadows of the dark parts like that and like if I go further you can see that they're dark areas are now going sighing and now what I've got is highlights that are red and shadows the tsiyon but I'm going to pull that sign out like that so now you can see that all it's done is it's affected the highlights naming li the sunset and then clouds it looks really nice now this is where your knowledge of art comes in because what you want is an orange sunset and if you add yellow to red it creates orange so in my drop down menu here if I click that what you can see is that there is no yellow here but what you have is a blue and opposite to blue on the color wheel is yellow so again if I push up it adds blue if I pull down it adds yellow so I want to add yellow into the highlights so I pull down into the highlight box and I will push up here into the shadows and that only affects the highlights and not the shadows and I can adjust this a little bit fo if I push up you can see how all the shadow in the dark areas are going blue and if I pull down I've only affected now the yellows in the sky let's give it a bit more like that great that's good and the next one is the green the green curve I can push up to add green if I pulled down it adds magenta so I'm just going to play with this and see how it looks to be fair if I pull it down that magenta in the sky really looked and looks nice makes it look a bit more purpley so I'm going to pull it down and put that magenta in the sky and maybe lift it out of the shadows a little bit there yep like that so let me just show you here that's the before and that's the after so that's the original with the just the normal s-curve and then that is with a bit of color enhanced using that little bit of knowledge with curves so I'm going to get rid of that box for now and look I'll just get rid of these that's the original that's the s-curve and that's with the color curves now I want to make this sunset really dark really deep so I'm going to add another curves adjustment layer and this time I'm going to use RGB which is the whole picture and I'm going to darken it now look at that look how much I can make this sunset and these clouds really deep and dark so I'm going to make it to about there and I'm going to get rid of a bit bit more actually and I'm going to get rid of that box there like that now what you can see is a lovely dark sunset and but this area over here is too dark now this is where a curves adjustment layer comes in you can select the mask of that curves adjustment layer you can use the paintbrush which is over here and you can paint over the curves adjustment layer and take away some of that darkness in the areas that you don't want it to be so first of all select the paintbrush tool make sure you're on the paintbrush tool and always make sure that you're working on the mask which is the white part over here take your opacity down mines all right there about 16% 20 whatever that's about right check that your hardness of your brush is on zero and that's this little option here and that gives you a nice soft brush if you use your bracket keys as press return there if you hit your bracket keys you can make your brush bigger and smaller and then you're going to just paint over the areas where you want it to be lighter and I'm going to just look at the curves adjustment layer down here and you can see it's going a little bit gray and that is where I'm taking away this layer so it doesn't show now I only want it to be in the sunset so I will keep going over it until I'm happy it's a bit too dark up here so I'll take that away a little bit there and down here I quite like it in the water reflection so I'm going to leave it there like that then I'm going to make my brush size smaller and I'm just going to paint over the land part here to bring it back and make it nice and light again like that now I can see I'm getting a little edge which I don't want so I'm going to flick my paint back to white by clicking on this and I'm going to paint with white just on the edge there to bring it back again okay hide the layer so there is that new adjustment layer that I've put on and you can see that it's dark in the sunset and it's not look at this area here it's not affecting the land just the sky now some people might be thinking well why didn't use the burn tool or the burn tool will actually will literally just burn the image so it might start to go a bit murky or black and the other thing with a curves adjustment layer is I can click back on this here double click on this and it brings up this original curve and I can make it lighter and darker just in the area that is not being masked off so I can even make it darker or if I think to myself you know what let's make it a bit more Orange I can select the blue put a bit of yellow in it and look it makes it a little bit more Orange bit of red look at that I can go like that I can also take the opacity down of this layer if I don't want it to be too prominent so let's put it down to about 80% and that is how you can use curve adjustment layers to improve your picture here's the original hold down the Alt key and click on your original layer and it will hide everything else so original curves adjustment beautiful and that's it that's using curves in Photoshop I hope this helps you understand using curves more and it's going to make your pictures look a lot better if you like this tutorial don't forget to subscribe and like us on social media and I hope to see you soon and remember learn more at the school of photography

Channel: The School of Photography

Views: 44,777

Keywords: Photoshop, tutorial, photography, Curves, How to use curves in photoshop, photoshop curves, photoshop curves tutorial

Id: 3JpN3Pnaxi8

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2016