Lessons
Class Introduction: HDR and Panoramics
22:44 2Light
07:47 3Profiles
07:23 4Tone Curves
02:57 5Color
08:35 6Effects
17:01 7Details
12:43 8Optics
04:05Lesson Info
Tone Curves
Now we're going to go back into the light area and let's talk about curves. Curves are really important items, but they're kind of their own version, so they're not like the light area. Exposure content highlight shadows, whites, blacks. I kind of treat that is one tool, and then the curve tool is completely different tool. They just happen to put it in with the light tool because it has to do with exposure, I guess. But I see it is a different tools. So click on the curves and it's going to show you a curve here. And that curve allows you to work on the entire curve, which is the R, G and B. So just the basically the tones of the image. And so if I grab something in the center of that tone curve and bring it up, see, it's bringing up the mid tones. And then if I take this part down, I'm bringing down the shadows, and then I can take the highlights up a little bit or down a little bit. So I've just worked on the actual brightness of the image, and this is kind of the subtle man's con c...
ontrast so if you go to the contrast knob, you're kind of doing the same thing. But it's kind of brute force, whereas the tone curve you could be very, very subtle about the kind of contrast you're creating. So I like that contrast. But there's I could go further with it because I can actually go into the Red Channel, the Green Channel and the Blue Channel to decide what to do with the contrast in those areas. So I can say that I want Mawr Blue in my highlights and I want less blue in my shadows. And then I could go into my reds and I can say I want ah, little bit mawr, um green in my highlights on a little bit more red in my shadows. And so I'm starting to get a really interesting kind of warm, almost reddish. Most looks like it's faded. The maybe the film had sat around in the sun for a while or something like that. So I'm getting a kind of an odd effect, which is kind of cool. So if I like that as an effect, then I want to save it so I can save that as a preset. We'll talk a little bit more about presets later, but I would save this curve as a preset so that I could then use it again. You could always come in and remake this curve every single time, but that would be a waste of your time. It's better if you were to take that and make a preset out of it. And then from then on out, you can, um, I just use it by clicking on a preset button, but we'll get to presets in just a little while. So that is the Curves area curves a really important.
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