Hi there. This video is all about getting more out of curves. I'll show you some hidden features in the auto section. Okay. I'll also show you how to actually work on the document rather than over here in the curves panel. I've basically given away most of the tips in this video there's a couple more to hang around. Let's get going. Alright, open up the files, curves one and 2 from your 04 folder. Okay, we've got these two are going to work on this one here is just kind of the darks are quite dark. Right? So we're going to go to adjustments and we're going to go to curves like we did with levels. There's an auto feature which is cool to get started. Okay, I'm going to undo who remembers what I hold down to click on auto to get extra features. That's right on Mac. You hold down the option key and on pc you hold down the old key and it just means it's gonna default to enhance brightness and contrast. You can just click through and to see if one of these other automatic modes are good for...

you because what you can do is you consider it as the default and then say you're doing a huge group of photographs. Okay, You can set up an action and then it will remember what you've done in here, let's say we don't want to use auto, we're going to go manual. The first thing people generally ignore with curves is this slider down the bottom here, you can see the instagram is all lumped into the dark side of the image. So there's nothing going on in this particular white one. So like we do with levels, just kind of tucking this in is going to kind of bring a lot of our work. So we're gonna really be clipping all of this. How much are we clipping? Okay. Remember our shortcut. We hold down the alt key on a pc or the option key on a Mac and I can drag this up and you can see there's just nothing, there's there's a little bit of specs here and there and you can start to see how far do you want to go? Okay, it's up to you. Okay. But you might decide actually want to clip it up to here because I'm okay with that detailed loss but it's really kind of bumped up the image before I even adjusted the curves. Now with curves. Often it's one of two things either drag this down a little bit and then up a little bit depending on your image or it's the vice versa. So just in here it's just like either a little s curve or little Z curve depending on your image. This one here needs to be down and that one needs to be up, you end up filling with this quite a bit and it's a bit disconnected. We're back a couple of steps until it was back to zero. I'm going to drag this up again and instead of dragging like these little dots and what I'm going to do is do it on the actual document and that's what this little hand here does click on it and what it does is you can kind of see, can you see the little dot moving up and down on my instagram? It's over here, watch over here, you can see it kind of bouncing up and down. Okay. So it means that when I decide like I know that's black, that's fine. But these kind of like blue jeans here need to just be brighter so I can click hold and drag up, you can see what it's doing to my instagram there. It's kind of grabbing those quite dark colors and just lifting them up a bit. Okay, you can just work on different areas. You might decide that I'm going to wreck it because I want to show you an example, but I'm just going to drag this down or these need to get a bit darker. This needs to get a bit brighter. So you just kind of working around and you start gathering dots in a more kind of organic way rather than you just going over here and just trying to lay in some dots here, eyeball on eyeball off now, the other thing like we did in levels is that you don't be afraid to jump in and adjust the red, green and blue channels separately. You can see here, I am on the blue channel, I'm using the on arts kind of finger Draghi thing and I can just decide whether I want that particular kind of tone to be more blue or less blue. Okay. And I can just do finer adjustments green, green, I want to kind of try and move out of that mid tone kind of green cast going on there even if you don't like using this tool and you like adjusting these. Okay, you can do it per channel. I want to show you in curves to that honored dragging thing is not just in curves. What I mean is this kind of pencil hand thing. You, a lot of the other tools have it, let's look at say human saturation has it, see this one here and it can be really handy for if I click on it and say this blue shirt here. If I click and drag it left and right instead of up and down. But I clicked, it jumped instead of undue, It started off as master. Okay. But as I clicked and dragged it goes, hey, you clicked on science, you must mean that. So that's just really handy. It picks the right color and then you can drag it left and right depending on the saturation. So you might just go, let's say more practical use and then click and just drag that up a little bit, grab on this, drag it up a little bit rather than having to kind of guess what it is or use the eyedropper. So check the different adjustment tools as you're using them and see if there's this little on art dragging finger thing. The other thing you can do is if you click and drag it does saturation, you can do hue as well by holding the on a Mac. It's the command key on a pc, it's the control key. Okay, if I hold that down and drag instead of doing saturation, can you see it does the hue, just a really quick easy way to change that man's shirt. Another thing I want to show you in curves is we'll use this second adjustment is let's go to curves. I like like that kind of fashion look. It's kind of a blue, orangey teal or blue and yellow depending on what you're looking for. I find a real quick, easy way to get that fashion look is curves, click on the blue channel, grab the stopper at the end here and just drag it up so right at the end, drag it up high and drag this one low and you get this kind of like, hopefully you can see what it means. It's kind of like fashion photography, blue Teeley color and it's super quick and easy to do. Doesn't take super long. We'll look at a bit more detailed version of that. I'm kind of going and maybe a bit extreme. Hope you get what I mean. So looking good looking fashion magazine, I'll have that kind of rose gold teal look. Alright, so that is some advanced uses of the curves panel. One thing I should note if you've come from essentials, curves and levels do not the exact same thing. I don't want to get in trouble, but they are solving the same problem. We're trying to work on things like the exposure and the color cast and I've gone to work at places where like, oh my goodness, you're using levels. What the heck? Why are you using levels? Curves are so much better and like cool. So I got better at curves and then go to the next job and they're like, why, why are you messing around with curves and why using levels are so much better? Like there's no right or wrong. People get a little bit passionate about levels versus curves. So don't worry too much, I use levels a whole lot more because I'm just doing quick, simple adjustments. I'll only open curves if I want to get into the finer, finer details and that's why you'll probably find photographers tend to use curves a lot more. You find, if you're a photographer, you'll find a lot more tutorials using curves because of that finer detail for me, I'm more in the design space. The photographs often aren't mine. So I'm often not as particular about the hardcore detail. They're both great tools, but you probably don't need them both at the same time. Either the levels girl or are curves, girl. Oh boy. Alright, let's get into the next video.

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Daniel Walter Scott

Multi-award winning, influential media designer & Adobe Certified Instructor with 15+ yrs of experience.

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topics covered in this class

Adobe Photoshop Post-Processing Photo Editing

Ratings and Reviews

Shah Nawaz

Amazing experience but it is little old. You should update with latest version of PS

Uli N

Great class, but outdated PS version. It was confusing sometimes. Some tools are not in PS anymore and more tools have been added which is not included in the course.

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Advanced Curves in Adobe Photoshop CC

Advanced Curves in Adobe Photoshop CC

Lesson Info

29. Advanced Curves in Adobe Photoshop CC

Lessons

Class Introduction

Before you get Started with the Photoshop Advanced Course

The Easiest Way in the World to Mask a Person in Adobe Photoshop

Class Project - Select Subject

Select Mask & Changing a Color using Photoshop - Color Range

Using Photoshop Selection to Fix Grass & Sky - Color Range

How to Change the Color of Skin in Photoshop - Color Range

How to Create an Ink Splash Image Around Text - Color Range

Class Project - Color Range in Adobe Photoshop

Mask on a Group Rather than each Layer

Advanced Masking using a Channels in Adobe Photoshop

Class Project - Channel Mask

How to Make Selections in Photoshop Based on the Focus Area

Class Project - Focus Area

Selection Trick Using the Smudge Tool in Photoshop

Future of Selections in Photoshop with Adobe Sneaks

Quiz - Selection & Masking

Advanced Preference Changes for Adobe Photoshop

How to Speed up Adobe Photoshop if it’s Running Slow

Workflow Tips & Tricks Like a Professional in Photoshop

Advanced Layer Tricks in Adobe Photoshop CC

Automatically Add a Watermark Text or Logo in Photoshop

Batch or Image Process Multiple Images at Once in Photoshop

How to put Loads of Images into one Photoshop File Quickly

Weird Adobe Photoshop Features & Easter Eggs

How to Enlarge Images Without Becoming Blurry in Photoshop

How to Fix Blurry Images in Photoshop Using Shake Reductions

Advanced Color & Tone Correction Using Levels in Photoshop

Advanced Curves in Adobe Photoshop CC

Quiz - Fixing Images

How to Reshape Images Without Distorting in Photoshop Content Aware Scale

How to use Content Aware Move in Photoshop

How to use Content Aware Extend in Adobe Photoshop

Removing Objects Using Content Aware Fill in Photoshop

Class Project - Content Aware Fill

Cropping Tricks Delete Pixel & Reveal Cropped Content in Photoshop

Automatically Crop & Rotate Scanned Documents in Photoshop

Crop Angled Images to Straighten Perspective Cropping Photoshop

How to Trim the White Away from the Edge of an Image in Photoshop

Automatically Align Layers in Adobe Photoshop CC

How to Reshape Images using the Puppet Warp in Photoshop

Class Exercise - Puppet Warp

How to Change the Perspective in Photoshop Perspective Warp

Quiz - Cropping & Aligning & Distorting

How to Color Black & White Image in Photoshop

How to Create a Duotone Effect in Adobe Photoshop CC

44. Class Project – Duotone in Adobe Photoshop

How to create the Glitch Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Class Project - Glitch Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Color Grading with Orange & Teal Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Class Project - Color Grading in Adobe Photoshop

Quiz - Color

Advanced CC Libraries Tricks and Tips Photoshop

Advanced Type Trick & Workflows in Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop Can Guess your Font Using Match Fonts

Quiz - Typography

52. Adding Artboards to your Photoshop Workflow Properly

How to Add Images Correctly to a Photoshop Artboard

Using Smart Objects & Relinking Images in Photoshop

Advanced Speed Tricks for Updating Artboards in Photoshop

Export Artboards as PDF & Separate JPGs in Photoshop

Quiz - Artboards

Advanced Tricks for Healing Brush for Retouching in Photoshop

Don’t Forget About Clone Tool Stamp in Photoshop

How to use the Patch Tool for Retouching in Photoshop

Class Exercise – Retouching in Photoshop

How to Retouch in Photoshop Using Face Aware in Liquify

How to Use Vanishing Point to Mocking up Designs in Photoshop

Vanishing Point - Cloning & Healing at an Angle in Photoshop

64. Class Exercise - Vanishing Point in Photoshop

Fixing & Retouching Skin Tone in Adobe Photoshop

Retouching Eyes by Enhancing in Adobe Photoshop

Retouching Eyes with a Little Bit of Fakery in Photoshop

Fully Faking Believable Eyes in Adobe Photoshop