Tone Curve

Lesson 19 from: Adobe Lightroom: The Ultimate Guide Bootcamp

Jared Platt

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19. Tone Curve

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Tone Curve

So now that we've gone through that, let's talk about the tone curve. The tone covers a really fantastic place, and and there's two different types of tone curves. So there's first off. There's this. What? It's just the no normal, linear linear tone curve, which is just a bunch of sliders, and I can change the shadows, the darks, the lights and the highlights. And this is a great place to add or remove contrast in a preset. So if you're making a preset on, do you want to add contrast to an image like kind of have a snappy style or something like that? Don't make the pre set up here in the basics because the basics are meant to fix each individual photo like they're meant to normalize a photo and get it exposed correctly and get the right amount of contrast and for normal. And then, if you want to add style to something, you want to add that style based on an additive process, so that you can just apply it to any image and it will look equally as good on any image. And that's why it wou...

ld be better to apply a snappy like contrast, E style inside of the tone curve. So you should get used to the tone curve you get get to know the tone curve because it could be a really good friend. Um, so I'm gonna go in here and I'm going to play around at the Blacks, and that's really making her her purse look nice. And, um, I'm going to I'm going to take the dark and go up and down with it until I like the way that purse and her hat look, that's what I'm looking at. And then I'm gonna take the lights, and that's gonna see how I can make that really, you know, pop out nicely like that looks real snappy and then high the highlights. I'll bring them back down a little bit so that I don't have super bright. And now that looks really nice. And it's a snappy style, and you can see if I turn this off. It looks much more normal, and if I turn it on, it's a lot snappier, but but either way is fine, because the original underlying image and the adjustments that I made in the basic panel are all still there. and they're still good. And then the tone curve is just adding to that, adding a little curve over the top of it. Now, if I right click this, I can reset it and just just reset all of it. So I'm back to normal, and then I'm gonna go instead. And you can actually use both of these in tandem. So you could you could apply a little bit of a curve here, and then you could also go into and this is right here under these sliders. There's a little box on the right hand corner, bottom corner, and that is the tone curve. But you use it like you would in photo shop. So now you can actually manipulate the tone curve with just points so I can take the points down. I can take the points up, and this is why they call it a point curve. So I can mess with this to my heart's content. But I'm gonna right click it and flatten it. Um, Mawr, Importantly is, I can come in here to the channel and change it just like a wooden photo shop. I can change it to rgb two red green or blue, and this is where you can start to play with the actual image colors. So if I want to play around and make kind of a cross process, he look, I can do that right here because I can change what the read looks like in the highlights and shadows. So if I wanted to do kind of a green looking across process, I'm just gonna take red down so that I'm getting some greens to pull back in there. But in the shadows, Maybe I wanted to kind of come back up to be a little bit red. So already I'm getting kind of an interesting look there, and then I can go down and click on Green, and I could increase the green a little bit in the highlights, and I could decrease the green in the shadows a little bit. Then I can go over to the blue and on the blue Aiken, bring the blue down in the like take it up in the shadows, but bring it down in the highlights and so you can see that I've got this really interesting, a little bit ugly there, and I don't like the way it looks on her face, but that's OK because now I can go back to the red and say, Well, or maybe back in the green, you can take the high that out of her face. So now the highlights don't have as much green in them. That looks much better. And it's still a really interesting look. And so now I've got this curve that is a little bit of the linear curve here. So shadows highlights darks, lights, and then I've got the point curve underlying it, which has red, green and blue separated out with different curves. And it creates an interesting look. Once I've done that, I can take that tone curve and come over to the left hand side. And this is really important. If you wasted that much time on a curve, you better save that curve if you like it. So I'm gonna click on that plus symbol and say, create a preset, and then I'm gonna go into that preset. I'm gonna name it so we'll just call it Ah ah, green blue curve. And what I'll do is I'll put a code at the beginning of it so that because you want your presets to fall in order so that you know where they are. So you're not hunting around alphabetically for him. Um and so what I'll do is I'll label it so I'll just say, uh so it's going to go in the curves collection, but right at the moment, I'll just put it in the user presets and then I'll drag it there later. So I'm just gonna call this for now. I'll just call this, uh, curve. Let's see. Let's just say, 0 12 curve, um, green blue. That's how we'll make label it. And then I'll put it in the user presets. And then I have to decide what is going into this preset. And so I'm gonna go down to the bottom of it and say, Check none, because I don't want everything involved. The only thing I want to be involved in this preset is one thing, and that is the tone curve itself. That's it, because that's the only thing I want to apply to images. If I add the basic tones and white balance and stuff like that, I'll ruin any photo that I added to, except for this one. So we only want to do the tone curve and then I'm going to hit, create. And now, down here in the user presets right here you will see that I've got something called oat to curve green blue. And then I can come up here into my curves collections and see how it's labeled. So it's like 0123456789 etcetera. So now I could just say OK, well, I want this to fall in my tone curves, and I want it to be right here at basically 30 right between 30 and 31. So now what I'll do is just go back into my that curve that I just made and I will rename it. So I'm gonna just say, rename this. I'm going to call this a lips 31 a and then hit. Okay, so now I've got something called 31 a and then I'll have to do is grab it and drag it into that folder. And boom, it is now in position right up here next to 31 31 a green blue curve. So now I just have a bunch of curves and so I can see Heiken scroll through my curves until I find that when I like and actually like this, which one? That one, which is called Thin film Fiber. Cool blue. So when I click on that, I've got another curve. But see, I have the that curve and I could go up and choose this other green blue curve and I. It's easy to find a curve, but remember, I'm constantly saving those curves so that I'm not having to do it again, because you should never spend a lot of time on each image making a specific curve for that image, especially if you're trying to do. If you're doing one landscape a day or something like that, no big deal. But if you're shooting portrait's or weddings or events or something like that, you really got to get through those images. And so hunting around for a curve is not a good idea. Are working on a curve

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Jared Platt

Jared Platt is an international wedding, lifestyle, and portrait photographer and photographic lecturer.  Jared began his studies in photography in documentary and landscapes, but today you will find his images are a perfect blend of the three genres.

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topics covered in this class

Adobe Lightroom Fundamentals Post-Processing Photo Editing

Ratings and Reviews

Ira Richterman

I am truly a recreational novice in the photography world and this video is fantastic. Photography has become a very technical world both on the camera side as well as post production. Jared has great teaching skills and sure makes it look very simple. I would recommend this video for those starting out in Lightroom as this program can be overwhelming and has a daunting amount of information. I would like to know if there is a resource of location of contact to ask a question or two for clarifications as a viewer goes through the course. For example, when making a new collection and if you choose the option of making this new collection a target collection, what happens if you then make another new collection and select that new collection to be a target collection? If you click on B to add a photo to a target collection and you made two target collections then where does this virtual selection go, ie into which target collection? Thanks Ira irichterma@aol.com

catherine Haggerty

Loved this class. As a beginner it really gives me working knowledge to use LR confidently. This class is older, so a few times I really had to stop and figure out how it worked in the newest version of LR... but all in all this class was amazing!

Dan Clarke

This class was great. I've never used Lightroom before and now I feel comfortable in it. Massive amount of good info.

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Tone Curve

Tone Curve

Lesson Info

19. Tone Curve

Lessons

Differences Between Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Classic

Hard Drives

File Organization

30,000 Foot View of Workflow

Importing into Lightroom

Building Previews

Collections and Publish Services

Keywords

Hardware for Lightroom

Searching for Images

Selecting Images

Organizing Images

Collecting Images for Use

Develop Module Overview

Profiles

Basic Adjustments

Basics Panel: Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze

Basics Panel: Saturation and Vibrance

Tone Curve

HSL

Split Tone

Lens Corrections

Details

Transform Tool

Effects Panel

Synchronizing for Faster Editing

Spot Tool

Skin Softening and Brush Work

Range Masking

Dodge and Burn

Working with Specific Colors

Edit Quickly with Gradient Filters

Making Presets

Preparing Image in Lightroom

Content Aware Fill

Skin Repair

Skin Smoothing

Expanding a Canvas

Liquify

Layers and Composite Images

Sharing via Web

Exporting Files

Sharing with Slideshows

Archiving Photos and Catalogs

Designing

Making Prints

Color Management and Profiles

Archiving Photos and Catalogs

Using Cloud Storage

Adding Images to your Portfolio

Collecting for Your Portfolio

Publishing Unique Websites Per Project

Sharing to Instagram

HDR

Panorama

HDR Panorama

Making Presets

Creating Profiles

Maps

Setup for Tethered Shooting

Sharing with the Client

Watched Folder Process

Second Monitor and iPad

Backup at the Camera

Gnar Box Disk Backup

iPhone and iPad Review

Importing to Lightroom on iPad

Cloud Backup

Adjust, Edit, and Organize

Using Lightroom Between Devices

Lightroom Desktop

Removing Images from the Cloud

Profiles

Light