How to Use Lightroom RGB Tone Curve

hey everyone in today's video I'm going to simplify the term curve in Lightroom show you how it works and show you how you can use it to edit your own photos so you can find the turn curve under the develop module in Lightroom and it is just here this little box is our turn curve and it's just under all the main sliders that Lightroom has to edit your photos so something I get asked quite often is that sometimes when you open up the tone curve it can look like this where you can't really move the points around properly so in order to be able to get the turn curve that we'll be using in today's tutorial all you need to do is click on this little icon which will allow you to place points and move them around freely in your curve so looking at the turn curve it may look pretty daunting and you may not know where to start when it comes to editing with it so I have a really simple way that I like to look at this that will really help you understand where to put your points and how to move them around so just to break down this box for you down here in the bottom left hand corner we have our blacks up here in this next section is our shadows right here in the middle are the mid turns up our further up here in the top we have the whites and in the top right hand corner we have the highlights of our further so these are very similar to these sliders that we have in our basics panel but they do affect your images in a different way so I'll just show you a quick example with the highlights the highlights with the slider really targets the more over experienced areas of an image and it's a lot more specific in what it alters whereas if you use the highlights in the turn curves it affects the overall image instead so they definitely are two very different things so to show you a dramatic example of how this works so you can really see how the curve effects an image will start without blacks down here if you were to pull the blacks up as you can see it'll start brightening up all the darkest parts of the image and eventually your entire photo will be white the same goes if you pull the blacks to the right it will start deepening all the blacks in the further until your entire image is black and then we'll do the same thing with our highlights if you move your highlights to the left it will stop brightening the brightest parts of the image until the entire fritter is white and same goes if you start bringing it down it'll darken your image until it's black so a really simple way to remember how the movement of the points affects your Furter is that if you pull anything on the curve upwards it will make it brighter and if you pull anything on the curves down it will make it darker so that's a very basic explanation of how it works and now I'm going to show you how you can actually use this to be able to edit your photos so one of the main things that you can do with the turn curve is to add contrast to your further and a really simple way that I like to do this is I start by putting down three points in the curve just like that so we have the blacks point is already down for us then we've added a shadows point a mid-tones point and a whites point in order to add contrast to your further you want to create an s-curve with these points so something that I like to do is to pull the shadows down to kind of deepen the darker parts of the image I then bring in the midpoint up and I like to bring the highlights up as well and that'll add quite a lot of contrast to our image so our curve looks very subtle but I'll show you a before and after of what it's looking like so far this is the before and this is the after so even though these are very subtle points very subtle movements it has made a dramatic difference to a sweater aside from just adding contrast you can also add a little bit of a creative style to your turn editing something that's very popular to do is called matting the blacks which gives you a further a film-like look which is quite popular in Instagram so in order to be able to do that you just want to go down to your black point and pull it up right across the side of the turn curve and as you see it changes the blacks to a more kind of gray color and gives you an image and most stylized look you can also do the same with the whites if you bring the white point down for the highlights sorry it does mat the highlights as well and kind of adds to that feeling aside from just making tonal adjustments to your further you can also use the turn curve to add colors and create a more cinematic look or you can also color correct with the turn curve and all you have to do to do that is change your channel and you can create a new curve with the red green or blue Channel so just to give you a quick overview of what each of those do we're going to start with the red channel and if you pull the red channel up it adds more reds to your further and if you pull it down it adds more balloons then moving on to the green Channel if you pull it up that adds more greens to your further if you pull it down as more reds and in the blue channel if you pull your curve up it adds more blues to your overall image and if you pull it down it adds more yellows and greens so this is a very basic way of editing the color channels and we'll go into a little bit more detail in a second however you can just add a very simple one point in your curve and pull it down so for example doing that to this image adds a really nice golden green turn to the overall photo which I really like so you can keep it very simple for this tutorial I really want to show you how to add a little bit more of a cinematic look to your photos by using just the blue Channel so the color channels work in the same way as the turn channel does the point down here in the bottom left hand corner with the blues will add more blues too specifically the shadows of the furder if you wanted to add more blues to just the highlights then you would focus on the top half of the curve so for this cinematic look I really want to add some blues to the shadows and we're gonna go quite dramatic on this as you can see it's like very very blue and then since this is a portrait I want to give a little bit more life to the skin turn so I'm going to pull down on the blue curve in the shadows slash mid turns area of alcove so I'm gonna pull that down and if you watch the model skin turn it'll start to get a lot more golden and have a lot more life to it and just a very simple curve like that adds a really nice cinematic effect to your further so I'll show you a before and after of what that looks like this is the before and this is the after which is both the turn curve and the blue channel curve as well so there is basically an endless amount that you can do with the turn curve you can use each of these to all work together to edit your further in any particular way that you really want the combinations are honestly endless and it's really fun to play around and experiment with the turn curve I would definitely recommend with this tutorial to go ahead and stop playing with the curve put some points down see how it affects your images see how each of the color channels can work with each other or not work with each other in order to edit a further a couple of tips that I have for you to keep in mind when you are experimenting with the turn curve is that small changes really make a big difference in your fritters so you don't need to have an exaggerated turn curve in order to be able to see it in your image as I showed you guys right here you can have the smallest amount of changes in your curve and it will make a very big difference in your further and the last tip I have for you is to try and keep your curve looking as smooth as possible if you start having little jagged like movements in your curve as you can see it starts looking very processed and very unnatural it could be the style that you're going for but for a natural edit I would recommend to keep the curve looking as smooth as you possibly can please let me know in the comments if you guys have any questions and if you want me to make a more detailed tutorial on the color channels of the turn curve I feel like that's a very big topic that could be it's completely earned video but otherwise I really hope you guys learn something thank you so much for watching I make new videos every Wednesday and Saturday sir I will see you all next time bye

Channel: Julia Trotti

Views: 166,704

Rating: 4.9542298 out of 5

Keywords: fashion photography, portrait, portrait photography, julia trotti, photoshop, lightroom, premiere, adobe, natural light photography, natural photography, natural light fashion, digital film, digital film actions, canon, sony, photography, lightroom tutorial, lightroom tone curve, lightroom curves, LR tone curves, rgb curves, edit for instagram, instagram photo tutorial, improve photo editing, simple lightroom tutorial, beginner lightroom

Id: ktoTFaAxG4E

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018