How to use the Tone Curve in Lightroom | Explained

hey everyone if you have ever wondered how to use the tone curves tool in Lightroom to edit your photos then today's video is just for you I'm going to be sharing with you everything you need to know about both the tone curve and RGB curves panel and thank you to the professional photographers of America for sponsoring today's video at PPA you can join a community of over 35,000 photographers and find equipment insurance education and business tools made specifically for small business owners like you and I'll let you know more about them a little bit later on the tone curve which most photographers just refer to as curves is a graph which you can use to adjust both the contrast and brightness of your images as well as the colors one of the most iconic looks you can achieve with the tone curve is the crushed blacks or that film like look I used to be pretty heavy-handed with this earlier in my photography career and to be honest I do still really like that effect but I find myself doing a more subtle version of that edit now so while I'm going to be showing you some examples in Lightroom for today's tutorial the good thing about curves is that it's pretty much the same in most software whether you using Lightroom or Lumina Neo or Capture One or even mobile photo editing apps if it has a curves function they all more or less work in the same way in Lightroom you will find the tone curve in the develop module and to follow along today you want it to look like this curve if your curves tool looks like this instead you're going to want to click on this little circle here to access the correct one that gives us full control over our adjust ments there are a couple of different ways we can adjust this curve the first is by clicking directly on the graph and moving the points yourself while keeping an eye on the photo the second way is by clicking this little sample icon and then you can click and drag on a part of your image that you want to either brighten like this or darken if you are totally new to this process I recommend to use the sample tool to experiment and see how it affects your images so how does this tone curve work we have a line going diagonally through our graph and this is where we can make our adjustments from one of the general things to keep in mind is if you pull the line to the left or towards the top it's going to brighten our photo and if you pull it to the right or down it's going to darken our photo I know with Lightroom the other curve that they have here they like to name it with shadows darks lights and highlights but I find when I'm teaching people how to use this tone curve that can get pretty confusing instead what I like to do is show how the values of this tone curve a very similar to the highlights Shadows whites and blacks later in our Basics panel so those are the words I'm going to use to describe all our points so the graph starts with the blacks in the bottom leftand corner and these are the darkest parts of our image so if I bring the black slider down and then I bring the Black Point down in our graph you can see it's affecting the image in the same way further up we have our shadows so if I pull that down it's going to bring down the brightness even more of the darker parts of our image you can see how it's not affecting these brighter spots in the photo as much right in the middle I like to refer to this as my midtones this is exactly what it sounds like and affects the general bright and dark areas very similar to our exposure slider next we have the highlights and this is going to control the tone of the brightest spots in our photo finally the furthest most right hand corner is where we find the whites just like our white slider if you do bring that down it's going to dull the white point of the image you can do the exact same thing by pulling down on the white Point here in our curves tool a question I get asked a lot is if they do the same thing then what's the point of having the basic slider and the tone Cove one of the reasons you could see just then with the whites when I pull the slider down I can only go as far as the slider lets me it's a little bit limiting compared to if I bring the whites down in the curves I can go as Extreme as I want I can even totally underexpose my image if I want to something else I like to do when editing is I use the sliders to adjust my photo so I'll fix up if I have any blown highlights I'll adjust my overall exposure I'll bring up the Shadows if there's not enough detail for my liking once the image looks balanced that way then I'll move over to the tone curve to add some style to the tone of my image so next let's actually edit a photo using the tone curve to show you how it works but first I want to let you know more about the professional photographers of America who are sponsoring today's video if you're a photographer who runs their own business you can receive so many benefits by joining PPA such as up to $155,000 worth of equipment insurance indemnification trust that helps with data loss negligence and malpractice protection which is so so important if you photograph events and weddings and one of my favorite PPA business resources which are their customizable contracts you can compare and edit a wide range of documents including proposals cancellation letters model releases copyright transfers and so much more which is really really handy if you have your own photography clients so whether you are just a beginner photographer or you're already running your own business please be sure to use Link in my description to get $25 off your PPA membership so the way I like to use my tone curve is by putting two points down one in the shadows and one in the highlights and then I create an S shape which will deepen the darkest parts of your image and brighten the lighter parts and overall it adds a bit of contrast to your photo that is a super simple way you can use the curves panel and you can even do that instead of using the basic slider if you want to add a bit of spice to this S curve you can put a point down in the blacks and bring the slider up just like this to crush your blacks for a more creative looking edit you can also do the same thing at your whites point and bring it down instead so this is what I mean by this is going to start creating a bit of a stylistic look to your edit that's just not achievable with the basic slider once you've got a few points down I always recommend to adjust them slowly one by one while keeping an eye on your image until you're happy with the way it looks you'll find that you only need to move a tiny amount and it will make a huge difference to your photo if you find it hard to adjust this way in Lightroom for example you can also hold down the option or ALT key while dragging which will make it move more [Music] precisely next let's take a look at our AR g b curves with our colored curves we have three different channels to work with that all adjust colors in a different way there is a red Channel a green and a blue Channel when you pull the graphs up and down here instead of changing the brightness it's going to give us color control instead and you can see what colors it's going to create by the color of the graph here so in the red Channel if you pull it up we're going to add red to the furer and if you pull it down it's going to add cyan and I really like this feature in light room because it makes working with this a little bit easier especially if you're a beginner you can get an idea of what to expect depending where you move your points to so there are two main ways that I use the RGB channels the first is in a practical way where it helps me fix Color cast so let's take this image for example since it was taken in the shade it's looking a little too cool for my liking I could bring up my white balance but when I do that it's going to affect my whole image including the skin tones which I don't want instead I'm going to go to our blue channel here and I want to take away blue specifically from the shadows of this photo just like the tone curves the RGB curves also follows the same blacks Shadows highlights and white points but instead of changing the tone it's going to change the color from that section of the image so I'm going to click here I'm going to make a point in the shadows of our blue and bring that point down doing that has warmed up the image but now there is a slight green tinge in the shadows as well so I'm going to head into the green Channel and make a point in the shadows because that's the part of the photo that I want to change the colors for and I'm going to bring that point down to remove the greens and in turn that adds a little bit of magenta so here's a before and after you can see we have a nice warm look to our photo now sometimes to help the skin tones even more I like to put a point in the highlights of the blue Channel and bring that up it helps offset that yellow a little bit so looks a bit more [Music] natural the second way I use RGB curves is creatively so I like to think about it in a very similar way as the Practical method of changing colors but instead of changing colors to fix any color cast I use it to add a color cast for example say I want this photo to have a retro look I'm going to bring down the shadows of our blue to add a yellow cast just like we did for our last photo but this time instead of pulling pulling it down just enough to not see the blue anymore I'm going to continue pulling it down just here until the yellow is a lot stronger just like tones it is super easy to go overboard when you move these points even by a pixel so I would always recommend to go really slow and adjust each point a little bit at a time to make sure you're happy as you go along sometimes I will sit there and adjust my points with my hand also over the contrl Z button to undo and then I redo until I'm happy with what it looks like so I just go back and forth for a while until I'm happy with the image it also gets easier the more you practice so I definitely recommend to play around and experiment with different color combinations until you find some Styles you like to use in your work but that is all I have for today's curved tutorial I really hope that helped answer some of your questions that you had about using the tone and RGB curves let me know in the comments if you like using these tools when you edit your photos and don't forget to check out PPA by using the link in my description but as always thank you so so much for watching I make new videos every single week so I will see you all next time bye

Channel: Julia Trotti

Views: 48,293

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

Id: rHHERgv04q8

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2023