Adjusting Curves
Lesson 25 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential TrainingMark Wallace
Adjusting Curves
Lesson 25 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential TrainingMark Wallace
Lesson Info
25. Adjusting Curves
Lessons
How To Open Files
01:10 2Using The Home Screen
01:49 3Exploring The Interface
02:36 4Understanding Workspaces
03:04 5Tools and The Options Bar
01:56 6Finding Hidden Tools
02:31 7How to See What You’re Working On
06:19 8Selecting Things
07:06More Selection Tools
10:34 10Testing the Magic Wand and Quick Selection Tools
03:55 11The History Palette – Undoing Things
02:47 12Menu and Item Shortcut Keys
02:28 13Non-Destructive Editing
02:14 14Working with Layers
09:11 15Groovy 3 Exercise
10:38 16Layer Effects and Styles
04:25 17Layer Masks – Karen on Beans
06:41 18Using Adjustment Layers
04:36 19Using Filters
03:06 20Advanced Compositing Using Layers
07:42 21Non-Destructive Editing Techniques
03:17 22Understanding Smart Objects
05:16 23Smart Sharpen
04:36 24Understanding Histogram
04:08 25Adjusting Curves
03:46 26The Healing Brush Tools
07:28 27The Clone Stamp Tool
05:24 28The Burn and Dodge Tools
03:41 29Neural Filters
07:52Lesson Info
Adjusting Curves
We've changed our histogram or our exposure values using the levels dialogue box. But what if we want a little bit more control? Well, we can use curves. And so let's dive into Photoshop. I've opened wanna.JPEG. That's an image we're very familiar with. And so let's use some curves to make adjustments on this image. The first thing I'm gonna do as always, is to take this background layer and unlock it so we can manipulate that. Then I'm gonna go down here and make an adjustment layer and I'm gonna choose curves. And of course, curves, just like levels, gives you a histogram. Now this histogram matches our image. We have a ton of dark pixels on this histogram here. It's showing us that we have tons of dark. That's this background, Wanna's hair. Most of the image is in the dark areas. We have a little bit of midtones, that's her skin, and then some light areas and that is her shirt, but not a lot. And so what we can do is we can adjust some things. So let's say that we want these dark to...
nes to be a little bit brighter. So what we can do is we can choose a point on the histogram so right about here, and then we can increase that. So what we're saying is we're gonna take this input. So that's this level right here. And so from right to left, that's the input level. So we're saying right around here at 60. So those are dark tones. We want to increase their luminosity. We wanna make them brighter by bringing this up. So I'm just clicking and dragging. So that's pretty good but you'll notice that we have this curve, this line here. So when I add this point, I'm bringing up these levels but it's also bringing up all of the levels behind it and above it in this nice gentle curve. But what if I wanna change some things? So I think that the skin tones here, they're now too bright. When I change the dark tones, I change the bright tones and I only wanna change the dark tones. So what I can do is up here, I've got this little tool. It's a little click and drag scrubby tool. Looks like a little finger moving back and forth. I can go over here and say, where is this, this value? And see, I've got a little dot on my screen. So it puts a dot over here. It's saying, this is the value that I want to choose. So I click on that. Then I can go over here and I can say, you know what? Take those values down just a bit. So it's very, very subtle, but I've made the dark tones a little bit brighter and I've restored the bright tones. I might wanna say, you know what? There's some really dark tones over here. Where are they? Oh, they're right about here. So I can drag that down a little bit and I can start adding points to this. And so instead of the levels dialogue box where I had something to adjust the absolute white and the absolute black, and then drag the midtones between that, with curves, I can make adjustments all along the histogram and change those values back and forth. It's a really powerful tool and not only can you do all of the values here, across all the colors, but you can go into individual colors. So maybe you say, you know what? There's too much blue in the shadows. So I can go in here and drag this down and take some of that blue out. It's very subtle. But you notice that we just color corrected the image by going into one color channel and dragging those values down. Or maybe I want it to be color corrected to look a little bit blue in those values. I can do that. I can say I want blue in the darks, but not in the brights and making a nice curve there to do all kinds of things. Curves are really powerful things so it's a great tool that you can use to do all kinds of effects to your image.
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