On this channel I restore a lot of old
photographs. Today i'm going to show you how i use
curves in photoshop to restore a faded photograph from looking like this,
to looking like this. Let's get started so the very first thing i'm going to do
is give a short explanation of something called a histogram.
Now histograms are quite an advanced feature in visual editing
and can potentially be quite complicated, so i'll only be touching on the most
basic features of them here. As it's certainly not something which
you have to use to fix a faded image. The reason i'm bringing it up at all is
that i always want my tutorials to not only explain
how to do something but also to explain why we're doing it.
As i think that added context is really key to learning a new skill.
So with all that said you can bring up the histogram in photoshop
by going up to window and then clicking histogram. Now at the moment the
histogram is showing us a lot of quite advanced, quite complicated information
and for that reason it's quite cluttered. So what we can do is go to this little
drop down menu here and choose to go to expanded view. Now
under channel at the moment we can see the histogram was giving us the color
information for the picture but all we want is the raw brightness
values, so we can change colors to luminosity and now we have a much
simpler histogram to look at. To demonstrate more clearly how the
histogram works i created some examples. So a histogram is designed to visualize
the brightness values of the pixels in an image
by giving us a bar graph of those values. So in this first example i filled a
large space with black, a medium-sized space with gray and a
small space with white. And on the histogram we can see that we
have three lines one that's very tall, one that's
medium-sized and one that is small and that directly reflects what we're
seeing in the image. The left hand bar indicates the large
amount of black in the picture, the medium-sized bar indicates the
amount of grey in the picture and the small bar indicates the amount
of white. The histogram goes from left to right,
with the left hand side representing the darkest values
and the right hand side representing the lightest values.
In example 2 i inverted the image so the black left hand side is now
white and the white right hand side is now
black. The histogram reflects this because our smallest percentage
is now the black and it's still shown on the left hand side.
The grey is still shown in the center and our largest section
is now white and that is reflected by a large bar
on the right hand side. So these last two examples have obviously been rather
manufactured, i'll now show you with some pictures
that i took how the histogram works in practice with real photographs. So looking at this first example of a
pear tree surrounded by flowers the main thing to note is the histogram
is far more complicated now that we have more shades of
brightness within it. A histogram always looks at the image,
at least when you've set its luminosity, as if it were black and white.
Therefore the easiest way to see how the histogram is working
is to temporarily convert our image to black and white.
So looking at our histogram we can see that the furthest left hand side
and the furthest right hand side don't have very much information on them,
whereas obviously our previous examples had high spikes here.
Now this is perfectly normal in the real world you don't tend to come across
very many areas that are absolute pure black or absolute pure white
in terms of brightness. So in this example we can see there are a few
darker bars and that likely represents these dark areas
near the pear tree post and also this sign is quite reflective so we're
getting some bright white spikes here but for the most part we're not getting
anything too extreme. Our next example is a lot darker as an
image and therefore we have far less bright values on the right. In
fact, most of our values when we go to black and white
are at best lighter gray. Now this example is interesting as we don't
really have any histogram spikes in the center and that is because
this is quite a high contrast image. So we have a lot of darker information
and a lot of brighter information but not very much information that is
neither quite dark nor quite bright. Our final example here
is some very gray clouds and predictably our histogram is values of grey without
really any high brights or dark darks. So the first thing to take
away from all this i think is that every image has a
different histogram. There is no such thing as an objectively
correct histogram to which all images should look like. An
image such as these clouds is going to have a very different histogram
to this image of a bowl and that's perfectly fine.
The second thing to take away from this is that it's quite unusual,
even in an image with quite bright and quite dark spots,
to have pure whites and pure blacks in terms of your brightness values.
But what if you wanted to have pure blacks and pure whites within your image
well that's what you can do with a curves adjustment. So if i switch this on
quickly we'll see that our histogram has been
stretched out. This is afterwards this is before. We
have the same sort of peaks on the histogram
but they're now a lot wider and what we've done is stretched our histogram
out and what was previously our sort of
lighter gray clouds are now dazzling white and what was previously
slightly dark clouds are now black. Now obviously this is an
extreme example but we will be using curves in much this
same way to restore our faded image so let's get back to it.
So looking at our faded man's histogram we can more clearly see the issue.
So on the left hand side and on the right hand side
we just don't have any information. This man has got some quite dark shadow areas
on him, such as here next to his trousers, and also he's wearing a white shirt but
neither of those things are properly reflected by this histogram.
All of our values are in the center and are grey
and that's just not correct for this image. By the way if you've been seeing
this little warning sign up in the corner, that's not
something to worry about. All that represents is that this is a
rough preview histogram and not the final adjusted histogram
but if we click this little sign we can see
that actually there's not much difference between the two. Every time
you make any kind of change the histogram will update and go into
preview mode so for the most part you can just ignore this and leave it in
preview mode and as you've seen it's really not any different.
So to work with curves you'll want to go down to here
and click the create new fill or adjustment layer button
and select to add a curves adjustment. Before we make any adjustments you'll
want to make sure this curves adjustment layer
is in luminosity blend mode, so that we're only affecting the raw
brightness values in the image and not the color values as well.
If you were working with a color image and you wanted to affect the contrast of
the colours we can either use normal mode or colour
mode here but since i just want to work with the
black and white as it were brightness values i'm going to be
working in luminosity mode. So with that done this is the curves
control panel, as you can see it uses a histogram to
show you which parts of the image's brightness you're editing.
It also shows us, as the earlier histogram did, that the left and right
hand sides are rather lacking in information.
To start off we can quite quickly get rid of these gaps on the left and right
hand side by moving in our input black and our
output white closer to the center. We can do that by
dragging in these two arrows here. So as you see if
you click and drag this white arrow closer to the
center and closer to our histogram, if you look at our top histogram it's
now been moved further to the right. We can do the same
our black arrow and drag that closer to our histogram
and that has also stretched it out. Now we don't want to push this too far
at the moment and obviously we don't want to move in so we get absolute black
or white as we did with that earlier exaggerated
cloud picture but that is a good way of closing off
the gaps and if we switch our curves adjustment
on and off here we can see what a difference
we've already made. Now looking at our image, despite us
having made quite a dramatic difference, our gray values in the center of the
image obviously also need some work so we'll do that now. Now.
you can just click and drag on your curves line to add points
but i find the best way to adjust the curves line
is by using this little hand modify tool here.
This tool allows you to drag directly on the image
to adjust that selected level of contrast in the image.
It's far easier to demonstrate this than to explain it.
With the tool selected when you hover over the image
you'll see you get this little bouncing dot on your curves histogram
and this indicates which part of the histogram you're currently hovering over.
So if we hover over this dark point here next to his trousers
we can see we're on the left hand side of the histogram and when we hover over
his hand here that's a lot brighter we can see we're on the right hand side
of the histogram. This allows us to see exactly which part
of the histogram we'll be altering and then when we drag up or down on this
point we can see that's the part that we're brightening
or darkening. So it's usually better to start in the
center of your histogram i find. Which in this case is represented at
this spot near the man's elbow. Now looking at the suit we can see it's
a bit too bright. So if we click and drag at this point
we can darken it down. Conversely looking at the image we can
see that the background is a bit darker than we might like,
so we can drag up on that point to brighten it up. Now looking at his beard i feel that the
darker points need to be darker and the lighter parts
might need to be a little bit lighter so we can drag down on the darker points
and if we want to, drag up just a little on the lighter points. You can edit these
points at any time in curves by hovering over your chosen point until
you see this little movement arrows icon and then you can
drag it around to change the values. You can add as many points as you want
to this line it's very much down to personal
preference and what adjustments your particular photograph needs.
One important thing to remember is you don't want to drag your points too
far. So if for example i were to drag up this shadow information here you can see
that eventually you can make your shadows white and
obviously you don't want to do that. Generally speaking the best way to learn
curves is just to experiment with it. In terms of experimenting however trying
to undo an adjustment initially in curves
isn't quite as straightforward as it could be. Control,
or if you're on a Mac, command z may only undo
one level of error and pressing it again may bring that error back in again
such as this. If however you add an Alt in with your
control or command z you will instead take steps backwards in
your process, rather than doing a simple undo, So now if we keep pressing that,
you'll see it's removing our changes one by one.
If all else fails you can use this drop down box
in your curves adjustment to reset your curves.
Now if we press that once we'll see that all it's got rid of
is our smaller adjustments. If we press that again
we'll see it completely resets curves. Now this two stage adjustments to your
curves is really useful if you want to make
changes to the way that you've added points to the curves line,
without obviously having to redo this input output stage again.
So that's basically curves. One final thing to mention
is that if you lose your curves window at any point or it's closed unexpectedly
like that you can double click on your little
curves icon here to bring it back. Outside of the issue with the fading in
this picture you'll notice it has some small spots of damage.
If you'd like to watch some tutorials on how to fix damage such as this
or how to add color to images like this those are available on my channel.
Along with tutorials my channel has a large variety of videos which showcase
old photographs such as one where i coloured every pre-color photography us
president. As always any thoughts questions or
suggestions for future videos are always appreciated in the comments below. Thanks
for watching
