Simple Guide to Lightroom CURVES | Photography Basics

so in this video what I want to do is go through some really basic techniques for how you can understand tone curves and how they can help you make great photos [Music] but that's it see you all again so back at last doing a midweek video the 5 in 5 trying to give you five tips in five minutes I very rarely give you five tips or do it in five minutes I don't know why I called it that but anyway I'm back and I posted all my vistas books off now on my pre-orders so thanks ever so much if you did order one of these it's a few less not many but it's a few left so if you do want one then there's a link in the description so what I wanted to do today is talk all about the tone curve just go to the the basics of the tone curve really because I think something that's maybe not super intuitive and though when I first started using it a little bit more then I was a little bit confused by it and just did it by trial and error really so I'll go through the basics of it first then we'll have a look at some photos so what you can see here is a histogram of an image and then on top of that I've just put the the tone curve now in this particular case it's just a straight line the basic tone curve that you have that actually reflects no changes to the image and I want to explain why that is so at the bottom here this is the input so this is this is your image and this is the output this is what you see in your image file on the screen so this is like the raw data and this is the output how you're gonna see it and what happens is that this line tells Lightroom or Photoshop or edit ever editing software you're using how to interpret the colors so we know that the histogram the blacks are at the left-hand side the whites are the right-hand side so in this particular image there's no exact black there's no exact Y and it's you know it's got a reasonably well distributed tonal range through it with peaks in the in the brighter regions [Music] we should expect for a snowy image now this tone curve is saying don't do anything to at the moment and the reason being is if I just look at the input point there and that's gray halfway through it's saying output that as gray if I look at the white point it's saying the point on the curve there is white and if I look at the black point it's there so and then you know if I look at here then it's there so it's exactly same it's it's that that straight diagonal line there is saying the input the output the same don't do anything okay so let's let's add another layer in now and on this layout we'll do a slightly different tone curve so I'll do a tone curve that's more like extended what we call an S curve like that and what this is saying is a few different things really so so this is saying gray is still gray but here what it's saying is that this point here which is sort of mid gray now is a little bit darker and this bit which is sort of mid white is a little bit whiter than what it would have been if it have been on here and what this effectively allows you to do is change the contrast of your image so it allows you to distribute that tonal range of your image differently and look at it in a different way so if we just go back a few steps just to the curve what we can see which is which is really important is that we're representing those mid-tones now that are say between here and maybe here this range is now represented by this range here which is bigger so we've expanded or added more contrast to those mid-tones there now once you understand that once you understand that a steeper line adds more contrast and a shallower line juices of contrast then you can do really clever things with your image and you can start to understand why those things are happening so what we're going to do is going to jump into some images knowing what we know there and I'm going to show you how you can apply different curves and why it changes the image in the way it does so what we'll do is we'll go on it's gonna have a look at Lightroom so this is a good image here I've got in Lightroom so this is an image on one of my workshops of some of the photographers shooting this amazing sunset and I've just got the tone curve over the top of it now if I just applied that contrast that curve I just did what what what what point there we'll put another point there and you can see that that's added contrast to the image and and what it does is it adds contrast in this mid-tone area here but say you didn't want to do that say you wanted to add your contrast in the sky you wanted to make the sky more contrast II so to do that you would have to we'll just delete these two points you'd have to make it steeper in the sky area and not so steep in the other area and now you can see because it's steep here these bright tones here are represented by more tones now on the output side here so I've made the brighter areas down here and here and here more contrasting let's look at another one so on this one here we have got an image now say we want to make the blacks not so black well these easier to do that this is black and if we want to make it not so black then we're gonna say the black point here is going to be lighter and you can see that all the blacks go lighter what it's saying is that only show all these tones here the black to the white just on this limited range here so I don't want to show anything that's completely black it doesn't mean nothing the image is completely black the higher up I go with that I'm effectively reducing the contrast of the image or getting rid of the black and the image more and more and if I went all the way to the top then he'd go completely white hopefully that makes sense so what I could do is I could say okay I don't want any blacks but I still want to add a bit of contrast more contrast in the dark areas so if you remember how we do that to add contrast in the dark areas and we have to make it steeper so all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make that steeper but then we don't want it all to be steep so I'm just gonna flatten that off and what that will do if we just do it here same so what that's done now is its added contrast now I'm not saying this looks good by the way but it sadly contrasts in the darker tones in the image and you could do it the other way around I could get rid of these and like I say okay I just want to add contrast in the sky the lighter tones in the image so to do that I'd have to drop that down but I don't want to change the I don't want to change the shadows too much so I'm just gonna move it up a little bit so all it's doing now is affecting these lighter tones and I've added some contrast in the sky but I've left the shadow areas as they are and if I want so I could gain just get rid of some of the blacks in there so by knowing about this so by understanding how this these curves work you can do things that are really creative in your images and one of the ways that I do this is in woodland so if I look at some of these woodland shots so say I've got a shot like this for instance so this was taken there was a little bit of mist and actually it didn't look so crispy as that so say I wanted you to just reduce those blacks then we know I can say all the blacks I want to be a little slightly lighter and I can make it look slightly softer and it's a really good way of altering your woodland images also if I wanted to reduce the contrast in the light areas I could just remove that up and that's going to reduce the contrast here but slightly increase the contrast in the darker areas and if I want to do the opposite increase it don't contrast in the light areas and decrease the contrast in the dark areas I could do that and that's going to be shallower there in the dark and steeper in the light areas so by changing this you can change the contrast now what you also gotta remember is that by moving these things up and down you're also changing the brightness of those particular points as well because if you remember this this point now is higher then it's saying that mid gray now is a little bit lighter so two things that you're changing it's the contrast and how bright that particular point is gain on a shot like this this this is a shot that I've already edited a little bit and outputted it slightly differently so in a shot like this then again I'd want to just just slightly reduce those blacks in there because I want it to be just a nice soft moody image and you can go you can really you can really change that if you want to so you could really have a very soft looking image with hardly any black and that looks very different than what we had before with a just a straight line like that so hopefully that makes sense hopefully you understand that a little bit and understand how powerful a tone curve can be it's super simple you've just got to remember that all you're doing is saying this is the input tones on the bottom and what do I want those to look like on the screen how do I want those to be outputted and this curve just does that for you it's just like a lookup thing it just says I want this gray to be this tone that want the black to be this tone all the way to be not just slightly off-white so you can also use the tone curve to change the colors it's a way of toning your image so for instance blue a blue curve if I wanted just to make that what the whites in this blue were then I could just do that and that's just going to affect the both the highlights and in the image and if I reduce its gonna go more yellow because the opposite of blue is yellow so hopefully that has been some use hopefully you've found that interesting and you can go and have a play with tone curves it's a good idea just to expand just come play with it and try it but the most important thing is understanding why it's doing it so that you can understand why this curve adds more contrast and when to add a steeper curve on your shadows or a steeper curve in your highlights I also wanted to mention the 2020 nd hashtag absorve neglected that a little bit over the last few weeks but next week I'm going to look at some of the images as well so I thought it'd be really good to just share spring photos so anything that's related to spring it can be anything whatsoever share them on the hash tag hash 20/20 nd I'll have a look at them and then I'll talk about some of those images in next week's video and maybe do a little bit of a critique of them as well so if you're not interested in that or if you don't want me to critique your image then just mention it in the comment in the image and I like them I'll ignore it I won't include it I just want to point out the good things in the images and and share you know my thoughts on those images and if I can say anything that might help you improve the image okay that's it and until Sunday bye [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 58,077

Rating: 4.9835868 out of 5

Keywords: photography, lightroom, tone curve, how to use tone curve, lightroom tone curve, how to use tone curve in lightroom, tutorial, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: G7vZ0N11CbM

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020