Understanding the Tone Curve in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop

[Music] what's going on everyone Brian Bhatia is here so a few days ago I put a pull-up on the community section of my youtube channel because I wanted to know what topics you're interested in me creating specifically around understanding photography and photo editing and at the time the number one response so far was learning more about the tone curve so that's what this video is about we're going to take a closer look at the tone curve using Adobe Lightroom classic CC now the thing about the tone curve is on its own it is a very powerful tool in fact the photos that we're gonna work on I am only going to use the tone curve I'm not going to touch a single slider these are going to be original photos not cropped not no dust spot removal just the photo and the tone curve so just to give you like a 30,000 foot view of what the tone curve is the tone curve is kind of like a graphical representation of the tones in your photo so that's basically from the black point which is pure black in your photo to the white point which is pure white and in between you've got your shadows your mid-tones and your highlights and so what the tone curve allows you to do is manipulate the brightness or the darkness in those regions now it's not really having to do with color per se but it kinda is so it'll be a lot easier makes more sense when we're in front of the computer now one of the most common applications that I've seen people use their tone curve for is to make an S curve so an S curve again we'll see that in a minute will add contrast to your photo and a common question is well why don't I just use the contrast slider well there are actually several reasons for that the contrast slider is a global slider meaning when you drag it it's adding contrast at a certain interval to the entire photo with a tone curve you can control granular effects in the shadows mid-tones and highlights as well as the white and black point so yes you are adding contrast but instead of adding contrast across-the-board you can say maybe add a little bit more of a contour effect in highlights and maybe dial it back a little bit in the shadows and maybe boost it a tiny bit in the mid-tones so that is one major benefit if you're working with contrast to use the tone curve over the contrast slider the other key difference that I found between using the contrast slider and the tone curve is that the contrast slider is primarily additive meaning when you drag that contrast slider over to the right you're adding contrast and yeah if you drag it to the left it kind of flattens the image but with the tone curve you can actually adjust the position of the black and the white point and that's actually removing contrast you can actually brighten your black point and you can darken your white point that's not something you can do with the contrast slider so again you can kind of get similar results but for me I'd rather use a tool that gives me the most control because from there once I have that granular control I can really dial in the look as opposed to just using one slider so with that I want to jump over to the computer I have specific photos that I selected to illustrate how you can use the tone curve and similar to the video I did a few weeks ago the my favorite lightroom hidden tools where we kind of started basic and then we would build that's what we're gonna do here we're gonna start with the very basic use of a tone curve then we'll use the basic use of a tone curve plus one additional thing than a you know basic then two additional things and I think by the end of this video you should have a much firmer grasp of how to use the tone curve alright so here we are in Adobe Lightroom classic CC you can see I've got all of my wonderful panels open with all of the great tools but like I said we're only going to be using tone curve that's the only panel we're gonna use those are the only tools we're gonna use so there's an actually a kind of a here's a bonus tip with the Lightroom let's say you've got all of your panels open and you just want to focus on one if you press and hold the command or control key so command on Mac ctrl on Windows and you click on this little disclosure triangle all of the panels closed and then you can just go and open it if you press and hold option or alt while clicking on a triangle you'll go into this kind of solo mode so that only one panel at a time can be open you'll know you're in solo mode because the disclosure triangle is dotted as opposed to solid so just option or alt-click again to go back now if you have a version of Lightroom and you're looking at this and you're like hey this doesn't look like what I've got odds are you probably have this with these four sliders and so basically what this allows you to do is manipulate your tone curve using sliders but we're gonna be using points on our tone curve so just click on this little button right there and you'll be up to speed now let's just take a quick look at the tone curve I've got a few images where we're gonna build on how to use the tone curve but let's start with this gradient so all I did here is I went into Photoshop and I created a new document and I created a black to white gradient going from left to right so on the left you've got pure black on the right you got pure white and then you've got kind of your highlights your mid-tones your shadows so this right here this entire kind of range this gradient is represented from the bottom left to the top right of your tone curve the bottom left of the tone curve is your black point so that is the pure darkest blackest part of your photo top right you guessed it is the white point that is the purest whitest brightest part of your photo so watch what happens just to show you how one relates to the other and I think that's very important is rather than just jumping in I want to show you how these things work with each other so let's start with the white point here if I take that and I drag it all the way down look at the whites see how they're starting to turn gray until I get all the way to the bottom and now we have pure black because the white point is now parallel to the black point they are the same value so let's bring that back up same thing with the blacks look on the left of the gradient as I start bringing my black point up shadows start turning lighter gray lighter lighter until we are at white so this is how your tone curve works now the tone curve is broken up into regions from left to right you have different areas of your photo and we're not necessarily talking about color per se we're talking about tone although color does play a factor in this but don't worry I'll show you what I mean by that so looking at the tone curve again bottom left you've got your black point that's followed by your shadows the area kind of this region where your shadows are then you've got your mid-tones where all of the kind of the area in between your bright and darks are and then you've got highlights which is to the right of that finally followed by the white point now because we click that little button here that means that we can use points we can actually drop points on our curve and to do that all you need to do is click on that curve and there's a point so what I did was I put a point right at the mid-tone the mid-tone kind of right here is where this grid intersects right through the middle and watch if I bring the midpoint up look at the middle of the gradient see how only the mid-tones are getting brighter now I did this to show one thing see that dotted line going from the black point to the white point that represents kind of your neutral tone that is essentially the tone curve flattened from the pure black to the pure white that's the pet and if you have a point on your curve that you want to get rid of you could just double click on it to get rid of it if you have say multiple points and you just want to get rid of them altogether you can right click and select flatten curve and that'll bring you back you might also see here that there is RGB that stands for red green and blue red green and blue are the primary colors for displays computer displays and phones and stuff and the reason why that is is because every color that you can see on a display is made up of some combination of red green and blue so that's why they're there so let's say I go to blue you'll see here now that it's not necessarily that I'm adjusting blue but what I am doing is I'm either going to add blue in the particular range so here again highlights or I'm going to remove blue so what happens if you remove blue for example well if you're removing blue what you're left with is a combination of your two other colors so in this case it's red and green if I get rid of this point and I go to our red Channel and I remove red from the highlights again it gives me a combination of what's left which is green and blue which you can see here in that highlight area trust me listen I know that this stuff can be confusing it was very confusing to me when I first started and it was even doubly confusing to me because I'm red green colorblind but it makes sense watch this video a few times if you have to experiment with your own photos and you'll see what I mean if you're going below that dotted line you are removing whatever is in that region if you're removing red you're gonna be left with green and blue if you remove blue you'll be left with red and green so you're always gonna have one combination or another of either all of your primary colors and that's the case if you're using RGB or some of them if you're on a particular color value of those three primary colors alright let's move to a photo because I think a photo working with photos here will give you a really clear idea so again just to prove here I'm gonna hit reset this photo is straight out of camera took it in Tokyo outside of our little air B&B and so with this photo we're gonna do kind of intro to tone curves like 101 we're gonna use an s-curve and the reason why is I mentioned s curves are probably the most common applications of the tone curve because it adds contrast in a very granular way you have a lot more control over that as opposed to the contrast slider so this is how I create an s-curve there are many ways to do this you know experiment but this is the one that I use an s-curve requires in my case three dots I start by putting a dot right in the center for the midpoints I put one here at the intersection for the highlights and then I put one more at the intersection for the shadows so now we've got these three dots along with the black point and the white point and so as you can imagine an s-curve is taking the highlights and I'm gonna open that up just a bit and you can see how the highlights are getting brighter because we're on RGB so it's affecting all the colors simultaneously then I'm gonna take the shadows and I'm gonna bring them down and that's gonna make the shadow areas darker and richer and then I can take the mid-tones and I can kind of brighten them up just a little bit so now watch all just by that little manipulation if I turn off tone curve look at the change just look how much of an impact it has on the photo and even if that was it that would make tone curve super-powerful but there's actually a lot more that you can do one of the kind of secondary as far as common things that I see people do and I do this a lot myself is if you want to add a little bit of a vintage II look in your photo kind of give it a worn you know old-timey feel a lot of people will take the black point and redefine it meaning instead of having it as pure black you can brighten it by adding grey so look look over here in the image as I go further up you see how the blacks are turning kind of gray and you don't want to go too far because then you get to this area here you really want to be selective with how you use that you can also further kind of create a very flat looking image by taking the white point now for the white point look at the top of this bus as I bring it down I'm bringing gray so now we have a contrast II but kind of flat looking image and this is again a very popular style one that I like a lot and if we turn it on and off just a huge difference all right so that's kind of very basic tone curve 101 if you do this just on its own you should see some really positive results but there's actually a lot more that you can do so let's move on to the next photo so here photo of a waterfall let's start out just like before we'll add kind of three dots here and don't worry about the kind of absolute precision I just kind of like eyeball it and put it over there where they land and just like before what we're gonna do is we're gonna open the highlights just a bit let's darken the shadows just a bit and open up the mid-tones just a bit and just like before before after much richer photo right so the other thing we're gonna do is to further reinforce the lesson let's add a little bit of gray into the shadows and this photo here really illustrates what you know the impact the effect of adding great to the shadows it gives it kind of that vintage II look which i think is great I really love it now moving on to tone curves 201 we're gonna work with the RGB which we just did and now we're gonna work with an additional tone curve on one of the primary color channels so in this case here let's go ahead and we're gonna drop down and select green so notice how the tone curve is flat if we go back to RGB we still have our edits here you can independently adjust each of the three primary colors on top of the combination of them so it's again just so powerful now let's say I wanted to add some green to the shadows just to the shadows I just want to make the shadows a little greener to really reinforce that verdant kind of Foresti look so we could go ahead and drop a pin over here kind of in a shadow area or I want to show you this tool right here it's a target adjustment tool you'll find this also on the HSL the hue saturation luminance panel and what I can do is look look at the tone curve here as I move around basically wherever that target adjustment tool lands it'll show you what the corresponding region is so here right there that is kind of the dark really dark shadow area so if I click and upward just to pronounce it like you see how in the dark areas we're getting shadows but because the curve is going up above our Demilitarized Zone across multiple regions we're also getting it affecting the mid-tones and highlights which we don't want so first things first let's go ahead here I'm gonna drop that down just a tiny bit cuz it's too strong now I don't want the Greens affecting the mid-tones or the highlights which is where the water is so all I need to do is drop a pin and bring that down to our demilitarized zone I like that I'm calling it the militarized zone so you can see look we've restored that original color we've effectively brought the tone neutral for the green Channel I think so does that make sense because again look all we're doing is we are adding green remember anything above the broken line adds anything below it removes we are in the green Channel so anything above the broken line will add green and we're only adding green in this section here and this section here is the shadows in between kind of the shadows and the black point so you have to kind of think of it as kind of an x-axis and a y-axis anything along the x-axis will control what region anything along the y-axis will control whether you're gonna add or remove and again that's where this broken line comes in and if we kind of toggle the effect you can see it's just it's a really powerful effect it's not over-the-top but I think it works very very well for this kind of a photo all right it is time to move on to tone curves 301 the kind of capstone class we are gonna graduate and I have a photo of my adorable niece Ashlyn let's go ahead here and we're going to start with RGB and just like before again what I want to do is build from one photo to the other so drop our three points let's go ahead and add that beautiful contrast by increasing the highlights and decreasing the shadows midtones got a bit too rich so we're gonna open those up a little bit right around there and then let's go ahead and add a little bit of gray and what I'm doing is I'm looking over here kind of in the shadows of the jeans there we go really nice vintage look just before after crazy right I mean absolutely crazy three points and just a few squiggles and you're able to get from you know here to here I I to me that's just so cool all right now let's move back to greens just like before except unlike before where we added greens to the shadows I'm gonna take my target adjustment tool get right down here this time we're going to remove green and how do we remove we remove by bringing the point below the dotted line so again just before I do that if we remove green we are going to see a combination of red and blue we are removing this which leaves us with these two so let's go ahead and take that point let's drop it down and you can see what it's doing is it's adding a combination of blue and red but it's not just adding it to the shadows it's also affecting the mid-tones the highlights almost to the white point so just like before let's go ahead and drop a point here and drop a point on the highlights and bring that down just a bit you kind of want to get this as straight as possible and again you want to do that because that gives you a neutral tone so here you can see now that in highlights and the mid-tones we've restored the original color and just to kind of pronounced that we can go ahead here and bring it down even more you see that it's not really affecting anything and if you really want to dial it in you can add another point and restrict where that tone is being affected and so in the first example we did an s-curve second example we did s-curve plus one channel here we're gonna do an s-curve plus two different channels so I'm gonna change from green to blue and I'm gonna take my target adjustment tool and what I want to do is warm the shadows up a bit so if we're warming the shadows that means we're removing blue we're going below the broken line which will give us a combination of green and red which will be kind of a yellow so target adjustment tool selected let's go to the shadows there and drag down and you see how we are now warming those shadows and just like before let's drop a point let's move that onto the broken line let's even kind of dial that down even a bit more and one more point there just to get the highlights and the bright parts super neutral looking good and just to compare before after again before after and this is the thing this is why I feel like really diving into one particular tool and understanding it as much as possible will make you then much stronger of a photographer when it comes to post-processing there is so much that you can do with just one panel I know that this is probably one of the more complex videos that I've covered but I really feel like it's important and if you've got questions leave them in the comments below thanks so much for watching this video please hit the thumbs up if you liked it and I'd love it if you subscribe to my channel to see all of my new videos and bonus points for hitting the bill icon to get notified whenever a new one goes live now I'm all about helping you guys out so don't be a stranger leave a comment below and let me know what you think and if there are any topics you'd like to see me cover thanks again everyone I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Brian Matiash

Views: 19,379

Keywords: tone curve, photo editing, adobe lightroom, adobe photoshop, adobe lightroom classic cc, adobe lightroom classic, adobe creative cloud, post processing, how to edit photos, photo tutorial, understanding the tone curve, brian matiash, be a better photographer, take better photos

Id: 6UHm5oIbqOY

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018