How To Use The TONE CURVE In Adobe Lightroom (In-depth!)

okay so this video is going to be a little bit different to how most of my other tutorials on the channel are going to go i've had a lot of questions and a lot of comments from you guys recently about my newly launched lightroom editing masterclass and whether or not i'm going to be doing lightroom content in the future on this channel or whether or not some of the masterclass content is going to find its way here on the channel for free on youtube and the answer to that majority is a no but i thought for you guys it would just be you know it would be cool to have at least just just one lesson from the overall masterclass and so i thought it would be cool to to cover a topic that a lot of people struggle with in terms of the understanding of the real deep understanding of and also how to use this particular tool and that is the tone curve as you've probably guessed already by the title of this video so with this video it's going to be a lesson taken directly from my lightroom editing masterclass no additional edits just exactly how all of these students see it so if you enjoy this particular video and you want to see more check out the full masterclass at pacquay.com forward slash lightroom dash masterclass alright enjoy the video okay so the turn curve a commonly misunderstood tool and rightly so because it is one of lightroom's most powerful but most complex tools just due to how precise you can be with the changes that you can make here think of the tone curve as a precision knife either for adjusting contrast or for adjusting color over here on the top we have five different options for the tone curve the first two the parametric curve and the point curve are both options that are great for controlling contrast the latter three the rgb channels are tools that are great for color grading what you'll see here is a basic 45 degree line from left to right and as we scroll and hover over the line we can see that we have shadows being affected here we have darks being affected here lights here and highlights here similar to how when we hover over the histogram up top here we have blacks shadows exposure highlight and whites they're both kind of similar but they're not exactly the same what you'll notice is that when we click and hold on a region we're able to affect that particular region so it's very simple we just grab make an anchor and then up and down for that particular region super easy however what you'll notice is that behind this 45 degree line there's actually a chart and this chart is the histogram that looks very similar to this but just squashed in and this is where things start to get a little bit complicated because there is a very common misconception out there that the turn curve and the basic tone up here are the same thing but they are not you see what happens is when we make changes here in the turn curve so let's say we drag this up in real time we can see the global histogram because that's what it is this histogram represents a real-time view of what's happening in the image as we do it so when we drag up and down here we can see the histogram moving in real time however you'll notice that the histogram behind the tone curve doesn't change as we make adjustments to the tone curve why is this so well the histogram behind the turn curve think of it like a snapshot of what your basic tone looks like so say for example if i move the highlight down here you can see of course the histogram changes at the same time but as soon as i let go the actual histogram behind the tone curve changes as well and this is the case with all of the basic tone adjustments basically what's happening here is that the turn curve is snapshotting the image before the contrast adjustments are made so if we reset all of the curves that we made here we can see that the histogram behind the tone curve didn't change so what it's effectively saying is it's taking your basic exposure adjustments freezing them and then you can make adjustments in contrast after the fact so as i mentioned in the basic tone lesson these settings here are great for resetting our image into a point where we can edit them with as much detail as possible and then the tone curve excels at controlling the contrast of what's available in the image so basic tone first as the foundation and then the tone curve next as our contrast now a couple of cool things about the parametric curve we can actually change the splits of the curve so we can define what regions are shadows what regions are darks what regions are light and what regions are highlights simply by just dragging these anchors across like so so say for example if we wanted our light changes to affect more of the image this kind of split would make it work in that way so as we can see it affects the majority of the line as it's coming up and down whereas if we move this anchor down here if we go up and down in the shadows we can see that barely any of it is moving where if we move the anchor out a little bit more and define more shadows in this histogram then we can see that the line and the anchor that we give it affects more of the image alternatively we can just adjust the regions via sliders here and that's perfectly valid as well like so oftentimes you'll see a s curve being made as a contrast curve this is the kind of typical curve that you'll be using the most often because this is the kind of curve that creates the most amount of contrast whether you use the graph here and slide the anchors up and down or you use the slider and slide left to right whichever choice is up to you there's no right or wrong answer here okay let's reset all of this the next option is the point curve the point curve is where things start to get really precise what we can do with the point curve is set our own points so that we can control our own contrast as finely as we would like so a very common approach with this point curve is to actually make points like this and then create our own level of s curve like this the power here is that we can move these anchors left right up and down wherever we like but this power unfortunately also comes at a cost if say for example we drag this too far down we can see that the line here is actually bottoming out and all of the shadow regions we can see are all just very hard black this is also reflected in our histogram as well and so we have to be careful with how we are treating the point curve because it can go a little bit sideways sometimes this is even the case if we add additional points and some of the points are either invalid or they shift the point curve in such a way that it degrades the image like this as we can see all of this noise has started to appear all of this color noise has also started to appear we have no details in the shadows and all the shadows are black so whilst this method is very powerful definitely keep an eye on how far you go with this contrast adjustment typically for me personally i find a contrast curve that looks something like this to be the most ideal and typically what i gravitate towards one cool thing you can do here is we can actually bring this last point up and bring this first point down and what this does as we can see on the histogram is that it crunches the whites and crunches the blacks such that the blackest parts or the widest parts of the image become clipped and this is a common technique that is used in the film aesthetic where you have very faded blacks it's called this is how you actually achieve that look and we can go even further if i delete this point and let's say i bring this down just a little bit and i bring this last point up quite a lot we can see that all of this region here is just a faded black it's not even that black anymore it's more like a mid grey but this is how to achieve that look down here in the point curve drop down we have two presets that adobe has included for us medium contrast which looks like this which is a very just quick way to add points to the tone curve or strong contrast which is very similar and we can use these as a base to just quickly get started if you can't be bothered to make your own points from here we have the rgb channels now the rgb channels are mostly used for color grading so adding color to the image what you'll see here is that the behavior is quite the same we can add anchor points into the line here and we can say of the highlights we can add red to them or of the shadows we can add green to them as we can see the green section and the red section here what this effect does is it gives you a split toning kind of look and this may or may not be what you're going for but this is where the power of the turn curve when it comes to color grading lies now the same is true with every single other channel as well and this is a good time to point out that all of these changes are what's referred to as additive they stack up on top of one another like this so now that i've made changes in both the blue and the red channels i can make a quick adjustment to the green channel as well but now that i've got adjustments on all three of these channels i can actually go back to the parametric curve and add more contrast to the image on top of the changes that i've made to the rgb the same is true with the point curve as well as you can see we've already got points here on the point curve and even though we've added points on the parametric curve we can continue to add points on the point curve as well and they all add up on top of each other now of course this isn't what we would go for in an edit but this is just an example of the kind of power that the turn curve has so just to recap here you either want to be thinking of the turn curve in one of two ways you either want to be adjusting your contrast with the parametric curve or the point curve or you want to be adjusting your color grading specifically with the rgb channel curves for me personally i don't actually use the rgb curves at all because i find it's a little bit too precise and it slows down my workflow just a little bit so most of the time i'm actually using this point curve and usually i'm using a contrast curve that looks something like that really quickly and usually this is enough to get me started at least for an idea of what i want to do with the contrast in the image all right and that is the tone curve lesson taken from my brand new lightroom editing masterclass now if you enjoyed that lesson and you want more and you really want to start to upskill yourself in lightroom or you want to learn the most efficient non-destructive workflow for getting your edits done or you want to have a look at the masking tool and discover it in depth or you want to create a visual aesthetic that is unique to you or find out what style is or if you just want to watch me edit my portfolio level images the best of the best that i have for five and a half hours straight from beginning to end then you can do all of that with my brand new lightroom editing masterclass which you can find over at forward slash lightroom-masterclass alright i'll see you in the next video but until then get out there and make something that matters peace you

Channel: Pat Kay

Views: 65,625

Keywords: patkay, pat kay, photographer, photography, travel photography, travel photographer, tone curve, lightroom tone curve, how to use the tone curve, tone curve tricks, how to use the tone curve in adobe lightroom, tone curve lightroom, tone curve explained, tone curve in depth, lightroom tutorial, lightroom masterclass, lightroom editing, lightroom editing masterclass

Id: LLBfRQLwHkw

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021