QUICKLY Master the TONE CURVE in LIGHTROOM

welcome to another 5-minute Lightroom tutorial this time we're talking about probably the most powerful tool when it comes to editing in Lightroom and that's the tone curve everyone I'm photographer Tim Northey or TK North if you're new to this channel this particular series I pick a part of Lightroom spend five minutes trying to give as much information on that part of Lightroom as possible now today we're talking about potentially the most powerful tool when it comes to editing in Lightroom that of course is the tone curve now if you're anything like me when you first started out editing you were probably a bit afraid of the tone curve it looked complicated you didn't quite understand it and therefore you didn't use it this video today is to show you that the tone curve isn't that scary it's actually pretty easy to understand once you get your head around the basics and it is also a really powerful way to edit your photos not only the overall tone of the image but also for color adjustments so let's not waste too much time five minutes on the clock as usual jump straight into Lightroom and let's get started so before I get into editing this image let's explain the time curve a little bit more so basically this one line on your curve represents your entire image in Lightroom down the bottom here you've got the very darkest parts of the image we've got your shadows you've got your mid-tones through the center of the curve and then you've got your highlights up the top of the curve so basically the very darkest parts of the image moving up the curve to the very lightest parts of the image easy way to remember this is up towards the Sun the Sun being the brightest is at the top so as you go up the curve it gets right up the other thing to remember any point you drag up is going to make your image lighter any point you drag down below that line is going to make it darker so let's get started making some adjustments on this particular photo the first thing I like to do with my tone curve I always like to adjust by the points you can also adjust if you open up here you've got sliders which you can use to adjust different points on the curve notice when that you edit here it won't actually change the curve when you close that up so you can go in and make further adjustments using those sliders I like to use points on a curve though so the first thing I like to do when editing a photo is adding three points we're going to add in one for your shadows one for your mid-tones and one for the highlights what I like to do is bring up my mid-tones I'm going to drag that point from the middle and pull it up you can see on this particular image how that's already added a nice bit of contrast to the image just from one adjustment you can see don't go off it already looks a lot nicer second thing I usually do is usually darken the shadows by pulling that down a little bit this particular image the shadows are already quite dark so I'm actually going to lighten those a little bit then I'm just going to bring my mid-tones up a little bit more and then the third thing I want to adjust is the highlights so that's this point right at the top of the curve if I bring that up a little bit you can see it will just brighten my highlights a little bit as well again turn the tone curve off you can see already how much of a difference those three adjustments have made this is why the tone curves so powerful and why you should definitely be using it if you're not already so the other thing I like to do with my images is adding a tiny bit of a fade which is quite common as well so if you pull this point up from the bottom it will make the darkest part of your image a bit lighter and it'll kind of flatten out the darkest part I like to do this a little bit you'll probably see on some images people like to really go heavy on this for me I like to go I don't just subtle adding a little bit of a fade so I like to do the same thing on the highlights as well in the opposite direction so drag that point from the top down a little bit keep an eye on the top of the image you can see how that just flattens out and darkens the highlights a tiny bit so this one I'm going to bring that up and just emphasize those mid-tones even more to really bring out the water and you can see just from those adjustments got a really powerful image there already now the next one let's come across I'm going to show you a typical s-curve so if you've ever bought or used presets in lightroom including my own probably know or have seen an s-curve so these s curves are very common and they're common because it adds in really nice contrast image it also works well with most images so again we're going to add in three points to create our s-curve again the first thing we're going to do is lighten the mid-tones by dragging up you can see it adds in a little bit of contrast darken the shadows just a fraction and we're going to bring up the highlights a tiny bit so brighten those highlights so three quick adjustments you're already starting to get a small s again the next step you can kind of add in tiny bit of a fade if you want to and also crush those highlights a little bit obviously there's thousands of difference of variations of an s-curve this is typically what it would look like that so so far we've only adjusted the overall RGB curve you've also got individual color curves for red green and blue this is where you can color correct adding a bit of color and get creative with the time curve so let's start with red anything above the curve you're going to be adding in red and anything below you're gonna be adding in the opposite color which is SIA in the same way for each of your other curves you've got green above and you've got magenta below and then for blue of course blue above and yellow below the curve works in exactly the same way you've still got your shadows mid-tones and highlights by you're adding in color instead of changing at time be very subtle when you're adjusting these color curves tiny adjustments will have a big impact on your photos and it is very easy to ruin an image very quickly if you go too heavy so this image I've already adjusted the overall tone curve the RGB curve you can see if I turn that off how it's already adjusted that nicely if I come down to my red I'm going to add in a little bit of cyan to my mid-tone so I'll do that by creating a point in the middle I'm going to create three points again so I'm not adjusting the total image and I'm gonna pull down a little bit in those mid-tones you can see how that's created a nice little bit of cyan in my mid-tones and I'm gonna do the same in the shadows for this one just to give it a little bit of a pool at home now you can see if I turn that off it's made it a little bit more blue the thing I don't like about this image is probably a little bit too green for my life so I'm gonna come down to the green curve and I'm gonna pull out green from the entire image make it a little bit more towards magenta so you can see there again there's a little bit of magenta in those highlights so let's come up to the highlights and just bring that back a fraction so if I've turned my color and tone curve adjustments off you can see how that's affected the overall tone of the image but also the color of the image same way you've got your blue curve where you can add in a little bit of blue or add in a bit of yellow so for this one I might even just add in a tiny bit of yellow probably to the mid-tones there but I'm just gonna bring that curve back to the middle for the shadows and also maybe just add in that slight bit of blue to the highlights into the water there so if I turn that off again you can see how that's adjusted not only the overall tone of the image it's also played around a little bit with the color so as you can see the tone curve is a super powerful tool one you should definitely be using if you're editing in Lightroom the best way to learn is to always the practice and jump in play around start understanding how the different curves work I hope this video was useful remember to give it a good thumbs up and subscribe if you did get a bit of value until next time I'm ticking off hope to see you guys soon bye for now Oh

Channel: TKNORTH

Views: 59,093

Keywords: editing, lightroom, photo editing, how to edit, photography, instagram edit, lightroom edit, tone curve, editing hacks, editing tricks, lightroom hacks, tknorth, tk north, tim northey, editing instagram photos, lightroom tricks and tips, how to use the tone curve, tone curve lightroom, tone curve editing, how to edit in lightroom, lightroom presets, how to edit photos

Id: alkt5V6fw_c

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020