Hi guys welcome or welcome back, thanks so much for joining me! Today we're going
to investigate curves in photoshop and show you exactly what it can do.
So basically like I've just said we're going to talk about curves today in photoshop. Curves is
a super powerful adjustment that you can apply to any image to do pretty much anything that
you want to do. Now if you're new here I'm Jess, I'm a photographer person I take photographs of
all sorts of things, usually animals but not always. If you'd like to please do hit the subscribe
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critiques and a whole host of other benefits. We'll link the information for that in the description
below. Anyway back to curves, so curves in photoshop essentially like I said before is an adjustment.
Now an adjustment, essentially you can bring an image in and then apply an adjustment to it. Curves
is an adjustment layer you can access it via the adjustment layer which gives you it as a separate
little thing that you can mask through or you can use it as a global adjustment now i'm gonna be
confusing some people right now so if you're brand new to photoshop either check out our Photoshop
For Beginners course which will get you well up to speed on all of what I'm talking about, or go-ahead
and watch my basics of photoshop video which I will link above. So what we're going to do is
we're going to look at an image that I've got on the screen right now of Skylah and Alfie. Skylah is
an adorable little girl who has known Alfie since Alfie was literally born and they've got a really
special connection so we went to photograph that the other week and this is one of the shots from
that shoot. So what we're going to do is look at this image and essentially kind of run some
adjustments on it so this is a raw file, this is literally straight out of camera. We've got some
hot highlights here, we've got some very dark blacks here, kind of normal stuff when you're
photographing anything that has the extremes white and black and we're going to basically
explore them with curves adjustment layers. So let's go and look at what the curves adjustment
layer is and where to find it. In photoshop you want to be making sure that you can see your
layers panel. Now if you want your workspace to look exactly the same as mine then you can
go ahead and follow a video tutorial which I will link above which will walk you through those steps,
but we're going to bypass that today you just need to find your layers panel. If you can't see it,
go window and then layers that will bring up the layers panel. At the bottom of the layers
panel you've got this circular icon, uh it's basically kind of like cut in half so it's
a circle that's in half, you want to click on that and that's your adjustment layers.
Inside this we're going to go ahead and find curves, so when we've got curves just going to
click on that and what that'll do is it will add a layer that is a curves adjustment layer.
With our curves adjustment layer visible what we can then do is head up to the properties or just click
on that little icon right here and you should get open properties with your curves here. Now this
doesn't look like a curve at all that's fine we're going to make it curvy, if you don't have this you
want to go ahead to window and go to properties. With this open you can then start to manipulate
stuff and you've got different tools on the side that basically can help you to go through various
adjustments. Now curves is a really really complex adjustment you can do a infinite amount of things
with curves, you can match skin tones, you can alter the whole look and feel of an image, you can colour
tone. We're not going to go through all of those today because it'll be overwhelming and terrifying.
We're going to stick to reasonably straightforward so when you look at your curves you've got these
little arrow things down the bottom here right so you've got this one here and this one here, you
also have a graph that shows in the background. Your graph was probably going to be different
to my graph, this is the histogram so we've got a video all about histograms I'll go ahead and
link that above but this is your histogram. So this is just basically a visual representation of where
your pixels are in terms of light and dark. You have the dark side, blacks which is over on the
left and then you have the white side which is over on the right, in between those you
have your normal histogram steps so you've got whites, highlights, midtones, shadows, and blacks.
Are you with me? Across all of that is this weird line okay, so you've got this line that kind of
goes down the middle and then you have your kind of like different axis up and across. The main
thing that you need to know is you can use these little toggly bits these little arrows underneath
to literally pull across and close the gap between the whites and the blacks. This is exactly what we
do when we do a levels bump there is a video on that as well I will try and link it above but
i'm probably going to run out. When we do a levels bump we're basically just doing this so, you can
see these areas where we've got super bright light down here and on the dress. Now if we go
ahead and close the gap to the whites those areas will end up being completely white, there is no
data left there at all right so you can see this is awfully blown out and this is awfully blown
out. That's because we closed the gap, we moved the top pin immediately left so all of the whites have
been pushed sideways, so let's reset that off. You can do the same with the blacks, so the darker areas
we can pull in and we're now closing the gap to the blacks but we're also crushing
the shadows at this point because there's quite a lot of shadow detail in this image.
Okie cookie, so those are kind of your basic things that you could do grab close those gaps close
those gaps. The same thing happens when we do a levels bump so you can hold down option or alt
on your keyboard and as you bring it in you can see the clipping all right, so that's showing you
everywhere where there is no data left within each individual color channel same happens on blacks.
Basics basics basics. Now what people usually use curves for is to adjust exposure and contrast.
Those two things what we're going to look at right now because that is the real kind of
crux of what curves is all about and basically you can use it on every single image you have.
So if we wanted to increase the exposure of this image all we need to do is grab the middle of the
line okay, the middle of the curve. So we're going to grab it. Do you see how that's put a pin on it?
We can then click and drag that you can either go up or left they both do the same thing in this case,
so that will increase the exposure of the image Now I usually kind of just freehand it. We have
now increased the exposure of the image to quite a large degree. Now that increases the exposure
in the mid tones okay so the whites are kind of left where they are the blacks are kind of
left where they are at the extreme points, but you're lifting everything in between.
You can do the exact opposite, decrease the exposure, you can pull down or to the right.
If you want to delete a pin that you've popped in there just hit the backspace and it will delete
that pin back off. Reset back to normal and we can go again. So you can also drop the whites so you
grab the pin at the top right and you can bring that down and what that does basically is it calms
the white so it darkens the whites but it also drops the exposure of everything on kind of like
an exponential curve down to the blacks which it leaves alone. Now let's go ahead and reset that
back off and again you can do the exact same with the other side so now we're lifting the
blacks we're essentially matting the blacks. If we just lift it a little bit we matte off
the blacks. What we then want to look at is contrast curves because this is something
that you can use all of the time to add contrast or remove contrast from different areas of the
image by using masks. So you don't have to use masks but if we're doing a contrast curve what
that means is that we grab a pin and we darken the shadows and we grab a pin and we lift the
highlights, that is a very traditional contrast curve and as you can see we've added contrast to
the image by doing that. Okay so that's a contrast curve, if we go ahead and do the exact opposite
lift the shadows and then drop the highlights what we then end up with is a de contrast curve
so look how it's de contrasted the scene. So you can creatively use those adjustments to affect
all sorts of different things within an image. Let's say that you wanted to
darken the scene but retain a lift in the blacks. Well for that you would just literally lift your
black point and then darken the scene. That will kind of de contrast and darken, right. And then
the exact same works in the opposite too. We're not going to go over that one right now. Okay, so that's
kind of the starting point of everything within curves. We're going to touch on two more things
before I leave you guys out because this is where we start getting a little bit more complicated
okay. So let's say that you have got a area of black or white within the scene you can use
curves to apply a perfect white balance. To do that you need to make sure that you're nice and zoomed
in on the image let's say that Alfie is actually the perfect shade of black down in this area here,
we can go ahead and grab the middle pin, so the middle pin sets the gray point. If we grab the
middle pin we can then click on Alfie, you want to kind of go from middle grayish and what that
does is that will set the white balance. Now as you can see the white balance is pretty solid,
nothing really changes, it's a very very slight shift. If you were to use that middle pin on
something that definitely is not black, white, or middle gray, you will end up with a bizarre
coloured situation that shifts very very abruptly. So you want to make sure that you're being careful
and getting your white balance correct. So that's curves with white balance. If you're
happy with that you can just let go, if let's say for example, we wanted to very selectively alter
areas of an image, what we could do is grab the little hand clicky drippy dropper tool,
technical term, and when we click on that what we can then do is drag over an area
and then click and hold and if we pull down we darken, right, and if we lift up we lighten,
okay. So you can very selectively kind of spot treat different areas of the image in any way
you would like. Now I personally wouldn't really use this method but I would when it comes to colour.
I'm going to do that now, so reset that off and now we're gonna look at our colours. So when it comes to
colors within curves you have each individual channel, red, green, blue, okay. Remembering the
opposites of those, if you've done any education with me you'll know that the opposites of RGB
is CMY. So CMYK is a direct opposite of RGB, so C is cyan, M is magenta, Y is yellow and K is black.
Ignore K for now just focus on CMY, so if C, M, and Y are the opposites of R red, G green, and B blue,
you can get a exact control of your colours. Opening up for example the red channel you
can decide whether you want to add more red or more cyan. So, if you pull the curve down
you add cyan because you're removing red, if you pull the curve up you're adding red and you can
selectively spot treat this within the shadows or the whites just like we've done previously,
so same thing. In the green channel, same principle applies and the same with the blue. So what you can
do is split tone your images within curves because you can grab your little clicky drippy dropper,
we're on blue, I want to add blue to the shadows but I want to add yellow to the highlights okay.
So what I'm going to do is make sure I'm clicking on a shadow area and then I'm going to bring the
blue channel up so I'm adding blue. Now everything's going blue okay. Then I want to go
to a highlight area and I want to bring that down so I'm adding yellow and you can kind of go as far
as you want to go with this but that adjustment is more than enough to colour tone an image
as you wish, and of course you can mask away any area that you don't want to have on there
just like normal. We've gone through closing the gap to your whites and blacks, we've gone through
general exposure changes, we've gone through contrast and de contrast curves, we've gone through
matting the blacks and matting the highlights, and we've also gone through colour toning and spot
treating. But it's one thing that we haven't done and that's a general matting. So most photographers
have their own individual style and some photographers really like the matte style, so this
image isn't edited so it's pretty difficult to get a handle on what this would look like at the end,
but a typical matte would be essentially to go ahead and lift the blacks, drop the whites and
then add a contrast curve. So adding a contrast curve to that would give you a matting effect
in a way that a lot of photographers really really like. So what you would probably want to do here
is apply that so you see how it's matted it off
and we've lifted all of the blacks there's not really a super level of contrast
and then you would just adjust the opacity of the layer to get the strength of the effect
that you would like so for me probably around about there. It's an introduction to curves, I
hope I didn't lose you halfway through, if I did then you won't be here, but if you stuck
around then thank you so much, hope to see you all again really really soon and happy curving