Learn Lightroom 6 / CC - Episode 6: Tone Curve

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan tee pramantha Morgan T comm this is episode 6 of learn Lightroom 6 also known as Lightroom cc in this episode we're going to talk about the tone curve in Lightroom but before I do that let me take care of a couple housekeeping items if you haven't already I would really appreciate it if you subscribe to my youtube channel and if you already have thank you very much for subscribing I really do appreciate it now as I mentioned this episode is going to be about the tone curve the next episode will be about split toning then the next two episodes after that I'm going to process a bunch of images and throughout those videos I'm going to cover everything I haven't touched upon already for instance I haven't done anything with camera calibration I haven't used the radial filter I haven't really cropped anything yet so I'm going to be doing that in those episodes I'm going to cover up cover everything I haven't really covered and I'm going to reinforce some of the stuff I already did cover now today as I mentioned we're going to talk about the tone curve and I'm really going to give you an overview today and in those episodes when I process the images you're going to see me really apply the tone curve very effectively to some images and you get a better feel of what you can do with the tone curve today though you're going to understand the tone curve just a little better now I'm already in the develop module I have all the panels closed except the right-hand panel and you can see the tone curves right here now in this specific image I already did process it in the basic panel and I added two graduated filters to enhance the sky and that's all I did to it I didn't do anything else in any of the other panels now the tone curve actually in Lightroom you get two different tone curves you get this tone curve that is pictured here this is called the point curve and if you click down here in this little box right here you could see these sliders open up and you got some or sliders right here and this is called the regen curve now they pretty much will do the same thing to your image the tone curve though is jitter that I'm sorry the point curve though is just a little more powerful than the regen curve and the region curve you really can't mess up your image as much it's a little more forgiving and I'm going to start with the regen curve now as you can see along the bottom of this tone curve here this is called the tone axis and we have three sliders here so we have the bottom the x-axis divided up into four parts the four parts are the shadows the darks the lights and the highlights so we have the highlights at the far right and the shadows at the far left and the mid-tones between it are divided up into darks and lights and you can see there's corresponding sliders right here and as I hover over a slider you'll see I'm hovered over shadows right now you can see that part of the curve kind of gets highlighted also and similarly when I hover over the curve itself that slider down here becomes active so you can see as I go across the curve the corresponding slider will get active in when I go above a slider the corresponding part of the curve gets highlighted now these three sliders here change the size of the highlights lights darks and shadows so this slider here if I move it to the right I'm decreasing the size or the amount of pixels that are considered highlights and not increasing the amount of pixels that are considered lights so this slider will affect less pixels now when this slider is pushed to the right and if we double click on the slider itself it will return to its default position so you could manipulate the image a little more specifically by pushing these sliders around for instance right now if I go on the curve now I should mention the y-axis are the pixels are darker the further down the axis it is and lighter the further up the axis you go so if I go up here to the highlights area and you can see the highlight slider is now active below and I just pulled down so I'm pulling highlights down you can see the you know it's getting a little darker up in here you can see then the slider went down so I'm going to reset that but if I want to just effect a smaller part of highlights I move this way to the right and then pull down you can see the picture isn't being affected as strong as it did a second ago because I'm affecting less pixels because I limited it by this slider right here if I reset it you can see how it changed again way to the right you can see less pixels are being affected if I go to the left more pixels are being affected by me pulling down on on that curve so we're going to reset it so that just gives you an idea of the mechanics involved here between the curve itself and the sliders below the curve now most of us really use reset down most of us really use the tone curve to add contrast now you'll know in the basic panel there is a contrast control as you can see it's on zero I didn't touch it the tone curve for some of us seems to do a better job a more effective job and I'm going to cover this a little more in detail where I compare it the contrast slider and basic panel to the tone curve when I do all those different images to give you an idea why usually I prefer to use the tone curve now I'm going to do it on this region curve I usually use the point curve and we're going to get to that in a minute but normally we just want to add some contrast to the image and what you could do is you go right on the curve itself and if this is the middle of the curve right there what you would do is you would go down about halfway between the middle of the curve and the far left of the curve around halfway maybe a little further and you would just grab the curve by clicking on the Left mouse button and just pull down slightly you're making the darks darker because remember as you go down it gets darker as you go up it gets lighter so we made the darks darker now similarly this is the middle of the curve this is the top of the curve and we're going to go about halfway between those two areas maybe a little further we're going to click down and we're going to push up so we're making the lights lighter so in effect this is called an s-curve and it adds contrast to the image you're making the lights lighter in the dark starker so I'm going to turn it off by hitting that on/off switch so the tone curve is not active I'm going to turn it back on and you can see we increased the contrast in the image now with that said there is an easier way to do that we're going to reset this there are presets right here where it says point curve even though we're in the region curve but it says linear so we're going to open that up and go to medium contrast and you can see it added a little bit of an s-curve to the to the curve itself we're going to go down and make it strong contrast and you can see how the image changed before and after okay so we're going to put that back to linear so in using the region curve it's a little more forgiving because if I push up on a point the curve never gets a sharp like bend in it it it really kind of Auto smoothes itself so your image tends to not get as goofy looking alright for that's a technical term in my book alright so so that's what you know a lot of people prefer the region curve because it's a little easier to use and you don't get all these really drastic changes in contrast between parts of your image but once you're really into it more you're going to you might find that you're going to prefer the point curve so we click right here and now we got rid of those sliders and we don't have any areas of the curve getting highlighted when I hover over it or anything like that we still have the presets though and they're exactly the same so we could add medium contrast we could headstrong contrast but as you did that you can see we have points on the curve now we didn't have that before if we go back to the other one see we have the same waveform here or the same curve but there's no points now we go back to the point curve and you see the points are there now so what the points are they could be anchor points or they could be actual points where you're moving the curve and if we want to do that a contrast curve again that s-curve you get very very quickly and simply just go right right here where we went last time and push down and over here and push up a little bit and you're adding contrast you have the simple s-curve so you can do that very very quickly now I'm going to go back to the linear curve and get rid of those points but what you could really do is a lot of more drastic things to the image I could affect a smaller slice of the pixels so let's say I'm way up here in the highlights and I put a point right there and I put another point there and I take it right maybe even another point there and then I go right here and I pull down you can see how I'm just affecting the clouds like right in here pretty much maybe a little bit of the grass highlights so you could really effect a very narrow band of pixels in the image by doing it with this points and let me show you something real quick I'm going to put a point in the middle and let's say if I push up here you can see the curve kind of self corrects itself or at least you shouldn't say self-corrects but it kind of the whole thing slides down over here also so I'm pushing up over here but it's sliding down over here now usually you wouldn't want it to do that so what you would do is you might add this point here but you add a point right next to it maybe even a third point to help anchor it so then when you push up over here you're not really effecting below that point at all you're just affecting you know a certain group of pixels you know you're a planet I'm sorry as I talk on my hands because I'm Italian sometimes I hit my microphone so I apologize for that so so sometimes you're applying it to a smaller segment of pixels by doing that so what you'll see is there's a lot of times where we just want to affect one thing in your grid you could put these different points on here and you could affect a very narrow part of the image well there's an easier way to to doing that and trying to guess where it is on the curve and that is using a targeted adjustment and if you look right here we have this little donut right here a little circle if we click on that you can see our cursor turns into that that is called the targeted adjustment tool and let's say I want this tonne of grass right here to be darker so I could hover over that tone of grass and if you look at the curve itself wherever I move my cursor a point is moving around so if I'm on this white pillowy cloud of course it's light so it's way up towards the top right of the tone curve but if I go to somewhere dark it's dark it the more towards the darker end of the curve well I like I said I want to affect this shade of grass right here so what I could do is hover over that now I'm going to push down with the left mouse button and when I do the entire cursor will disappear that's just what Lightroom does so you're not going to see what I do after that so I'm pushing the left mouse button down now disappeared but I am taking my mouse and I'm just pushing it straight up and you can see I'm affecting everything that is that luminance value including that blade of grass that I was over I'm making it brighter now if I pull down I'm making it darker and that's kind of what I wanted to do so I want to make the grass look a little darker green so I use that targeted adjustment tool and I go over that piece of grass push down with the left mouse button then drag my mouse directly down and I affect the curve in such a way that I made right where I clicked darker so that's usually how most of us use the tone curve to try to affect the brightness values of a specific part of the image and you know using the targeted adjustment tool is how we would do it so let me turn it off for a second there we're back to normal so that in a nutshell is how we really use the tone curve you could get really technical you could do some different cross processing looks with the tone curve and I actually covered some of that in previous Lightroom 5 videos and probably covered in the future too I probably do it in one of those images that I process when I do a bunch of images but I think right now it's beyond the scope of what I'm trying to get across with the tone curve I don't want to throw too much at you one other thing I want to just mention though about the tone curve as you can see it says channel when you're in the point curve we're in the RGB Channel if you want to just if you want to effect just one color you could go to the drop-down and let's say just do greens and you could move this you know curve directly and affect the greens that way so you're going to really enhance green add green you're going to take green away you know by pushing up or down like that and now if we I don't know if I mention this earlier but if I don't like this point I could just grab it and pull it off the curve and then I could get to the point and you can do that all the time so if you have curves here or points on the curve and you don't want them anymore just pull them off the curve just click on them in and yank them right off all right so we're in green the channel green I could use a targeted adjustment for that too and I could go down here to the greens and I could click down with the left mouse button I could push up ted-like add green and down to kind of subtract green and if I don't like it I could just grab this point and yank it right off and we can do it with as I mentioned red green or blue so maybe you want to enhance blues a little bit well go to the blue Channel well you know get the targeted adjustment tool we'll go up here to the Blues click down on the left mouse button and pulling down will take away some blue and pushing up will add blue now it adds it to the whole image you know it's not you know just doing the sky but that's what it does so you can get a different look by messing with the different channels and we'll talk about that some more when I really do it on a real image this image here is just happen to be handy to show you it is you know some saturated colors which I think show up better when I mess around with the tone curve so that's really all I want to show you about the tone curve right now again mainly we're going to use it to add contrast to the image and the way I would usually do it is I just go to the preset and I look at medium contrast then I do strong contrast and I see if I like one better than the other in this case I think I like strong contrast a little better and then I may come in and I may just adjust it just a little bit you know move the points around a little bit just to more my taste and that's the way I would do it again you could do the same thing similar thing if you use the region curve you would again you know put it to linear and then you could start with medium contrast strong contrast then you could come in here you don't have the points to aid you but you can come in try to push things around a little bit maybe make the highlights less bright by pulling down and stuff like that so you can just give it a night you know you know and try it and if you don't like it when you're in the region curve you can just double click on the sliders that aren't 0 and return them to zero automatically all right so that's it for this episode as I mentioned we're going to cover that a little bit more in a practical way when I actually do some images from beginning to end so that will be in two episodes in the next episode we are going to do split toning alright so I hope that helps thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it thank you very much and again if you could subscribe to my youtube channel I would truly appreciate it all right I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 186,697

Keywords: photography, photographer, photoshop, lightroom, post, processing”, post processing, lightroom 6, lightroom cc, lightroom cc2015, lightroom cc 2015, adobe, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Software), lightroom presets, lightroom 5, black and white, b&w, Portrait Photography (Literature Subject), portrait photography, portrait retouch, portrait, sharpening, noise reduction, lightroom detail, tone curve, point curve, region curve

Id: 0-AYcQ6DKPw

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2015