Hey guys, Ryan here at Signature Edits and today we are going to demystify the
tone curve in Lightroom once and for all. Are you ready? Let's do it!
Okay so we are here in Lightroom in the develop module. Your tone curve is the
tool bar beneath your basic functions, and if you're anything like me and
you're new to Lightroom, you've looked at this tone curve before and said "this
looks a lot like my grade eight math homework" - and just skip past it because
it's confusing and you don't understand it. So we are going to demystify what's
inside and how to use it today. Are you ready? First we're going to explain how
it works: The tone curve is basically a tool that allows you to adjust the
brightness of any given area of your image. Whether that's the blacks, the
shadows, the highlight mid-tones, the highlights, or the whites. So we can
actually make adjustments to the image as a whole - the RGB value of the image - or
to just the reds in the image, just the greens, or just the blues. Now why these
three random colors, and what does RGB mean? To understand that, we have to look
at the primary colors for both paint and for digital photos. These are the ones
you learned about in school: yellow blue and red. Now the reason you learned that
these are the primary colors is they are... when it comes to mixing paint! So these
are the colors that you cannot mix from any other pigments, so therefore using
paint these are your primary colors. However with digital images we have
different primary colors. We have green instead of yellow, blue and red.
Now why these three colors? Why not just make it the same? Why be confusing like
that? Well to understand why, you have to look at the human eye. Now human eyes
have three different color receptors: One for blue, one for green, and you got it -
one for red. So when we created digital photos we said to ourselves: "it makes
much more sense to use green blue and red in our primary colors because those
are the colors that the human eye sees." And every color in an image is a
combination of these three colors. Now enough science let's get into how the
tone curve actually works so let's jump into a little gradient here to show you
how it's working now on the far right of our image this line here see this dotted
line and when you start by default this solid line represents your image from
the darkest point black black black to the brightest
absolute white in the middle we have our shadows here mid-tones here highlights
here okay so we can actually adjust the brightness of the blacks the shadows the
mid-tones highlights or whites by dragging them up or down on this little
chart if you're dragging it above this dotted line you're making it brighter if
you're dragging it beneath this dotted line you're making it darker than it
would naturally be okay easy so far now in our RGB setting you're adjusting all
of the colors at once red green and blue so we can make massive changes to our
image just by adjusting a few things here and there let me show you how I'm
going to click my blacks here and just drag it up now you'll notice that the
blacks are slowly turning - you got it white because I've added brightness
above this line until the white point which is the top of this now if I do the
same thing with the whites and drag this line and down we're going to see that
our whites eventually turn - you got it black now anything below this line is
also being affected so you can see that and adjust in addition to affecting my
whites with this point here it's also dragging the whole line down so
everything in this image is being darkened okay now if I want to adjust a
specific area in the image I can actually click a point and just drag
that point up or down so here I'm adjusting my mid-tones by making them
bright and adjusting them by dragging them and now they are black so you can
see my shadows aren't black but my mid-tones are okay does that make sense
let's hop over into the individual Channel so I'm gonna reset this and by
the way if you are finding that yours does your Lightroom does not have this
little point thing you just hit this little dot here and it will toggle
between two different settings one is for kind of making basic adjustments to
highlights lights darks and shadows without having to worry about those
individual points and the other is hitting this little bar here box will
pull up the ability to make micro adjustments okay so we're going to reset
and show you what is inside of these individual colors now why would you want
to adjust these individual colors well you can actually add tones to your image
or take them away or let's say that you have a lot of green in your image you
want to get rid of it you can do this using the tone curve under your greens
so we are going to take away some reds from the whites and you'll see
because we're removing red but haven't affected the greens or the blues we have
all the greens in the blue still in this image so we can actually add a green
blue tint per se just by taking the Reds out the same goes for removing greens
we're going to wind up with a pink a combination of blue and red or by
removing the blues we're going to wind up with yellow which ironically in
digital color is a combination of red and green so you're going to have to
relearn your colors a little bit because red and green you're probably used to
making purple and here we can do the same thing let's undo that we can do the
same thing in the shadows by adding blue adding red or adding green or
subtracting it by dragging it this way okay so that's how you adjust the colors
and overall settings in your tone curve now let's dive into some actual images
so this makes a little bit more practical sense I'm going to reset this
image and show you just making massive changes to everything in the tone curve
what we can do so if I wanted to I could start by adding what's called an s-curve
this is the most common type of tone curve and you're going to see it in
pretty much every preset you ever use or every tutorial you watch we're going to
add just a little bit of contrast by raising our mid-tones up and what I did
is I clicked once in the shadows that's where these two lines intersect once in
the mid-tones which is the exact middle of the image and once in the highlights
that's here and then I just drag my mid-tones up and you can see we've made
a bit of an s by doing that now if you make a point or you make an extra point
like I just did you can just double click it and it will erase that point so
just play around with your image and see what you can come up with I've added
some contrast to this image and you can see here is our flat image before and
after just a very subtle amount now we can add more or less contrast by
dragging our shadows up and maybe our highlights up a little bit there we go
you can see why it gets its name s-curve because it looks a little bit like a
sideways s let's reset that and show you what we can do in the colors let's say I
want to add a little bit of a filmic vibe to my image I'm actually going to
just grab my blacks here and drag them up now you can see because I've made
these other points that the line isn't really being moved except for this
tiny little section here so everything in this section is being brightened and
the value is being raised and that's how you get that kind of filmy vibe because
now in this image we don't have any absolute black everything below this
point has been brightened back up to this value I hope that made sense that
wasn't very good English but we are going to just roll on alright so same
goes for the highlights if we wanted to we could grab those highlights and drag
them down now there is no absolute white in the image the brightest we'll get is
a very bright gray so we can really reduce our contrast just by doing that
if we want now let's say we want to add a little bit more filmic vibe to our
image we can do something like add some green to the shadows so I'm just going
to do that a little bit of green in there and now we've got kind of a moody
sort of look happening let's hop into another image so this image here we will
reset it we have our green green grass some nice skin tones going on and let's
see what we can do first I'm going to go to my RGB and I'm going to make my s
curve here and you can see how quickly that just makes the image pop we've got
before and after now I'm going to see what I can do with these greens maybe I
want to make them a little bit less saturated well we can use the point
finder in our tone curve by clicking this little tool and it will actually
identify which portion of the image is represented by which piece which at
which point on our line here so I can go to my green grass and it's somewhere in
these mid-tones shadows and I can maybe remove some green from there and you can
see it just warmed the whole image up now if I wanted to make sure that my
skin tones aren't being affected I can go to my skin tones and just kind of
counter it so I'm going to click and then drag up until I see that the line
see this line is back on that dotted line where it started now I know that
just this area is being affected but my skin tones are still where they would be
naturally I can do the same thing by going to my blues perhaps and grab my
grass point drag that down just a little bit you can see it's warmed it up and
then go to my skin tones again and just drag that back so it's on the line
okay so now without adjusting any other pieces of this image we have gone from
here to here pretty powerful right lastly I'm going to go to my greens and
maybe add a bit of a filmic 5 by just raising my blacks a little bit there we
go and you'll find that the individual colors in the tone curve are definitely
a lot more sensitive than overall with the RGB so just go easy
you can always dial it back or add a little bit more at a time and I'm going
to add a little bit more curve um a little bit more gray to the image so
basically what I've done is I've raised up the black so we don't have any
absolute blacks making it a little bit more filmy and I can lower my whites if
I want and you'll see that it's kind of clipping things because now our Grays
our whites are all getting kind of smushed together because they're all the
same brightness so I'm not going to push it that far but I might take it down to
there so again here is before here is after and that is without touching
anything else in this entire section guys we don't have any other tools being
used just our tone curve gave us that really vibey Foresti look isn't that
cool I'll hop over into one more image go back to our tone curve and this is
just absolute flat image we're going to start by adding our s curve in here
clicking three times once in the shadows mid-tones and highlights and I'm just
going to drag the shadows down the highlights up a little bit just like
that we have gone from here to here added some nice pop to the image now
we're going to go to our Reds and let's say I want to make this a nice red sky
like it's a red sunset you've never seen before well I could go crazy and do
something like this add red to everything or I could go to my greens in
my blues and just remove some greens and blues from the highlights and why the
highlights because that is my sky my skies are very very bright so if I
remove some greens from it it's already any nice kind of blueish pink and remove
some blues and we have a nice kind of pink vibe going on now at the same time
if I wanted to I could add a little bit of reds to my shadows and we've gone
from here to here that's just with the tone curve it is so powerful guys so I
hope this was for you in understanding how the tone
curve works what you can maybe use it for and that it gives you the confidence
to use it in the future so your images really shine so if this video is helpful
please hit that like button don't forget to subscribe and you can check out some
free presets in the link below download those today and give them a try alright
I'll see you in the next one