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- [Man] Hello, and welcome to Denny's tips.
The tone curve adjustment, is a seriously powerful tool,
that let's you create allot of photo effects.
But, it's also very hard to use.
In this tutorial, you'll learn my secret trick
to using the tone curves, which makes it easier to use,
and it'll give you better results at the same time.
I have used this technique, to create hundreds
of Photoshop actions, and Lightroom presets.
And, if you've ever used any of my products,
you'll know how much I depend on it,
to keep things minimal, and less CPU intensive.
Today, I'll reveal to you my secret trick, the tone chart.
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Let's start by seeing how this technique works.
So, here we have the tone curves adjustment.
The tone curve is, in my opinion,
the most important and useful adjustment
that every photographer needs to know.
You can create nearly any photo effect
with just this one layer.
And, its a universal skill
that you can use in other software.
Such as, Lightroom, Capture One,
Adobe Premiere After Effects,
and even allot of Android and iOS photo editing apps.
But, the problem with the tone curve,
is that its not intuitive at all.
Allot of people don't know how to use it,
and for the people who do,
most of them only know a couple tone curve shapes,
but, they don't actually understand what's happening,
or why certain shapes are creating certain effects.
So, instead of guessing your way around a tone curve,
let me introduce you to this trick, the tone chart.
Using the tone chart,
you can change the tones in your photo,
simply by targeting specific tonal area on your chart,
like this.
It makes adjusting the tone curves a lot easier,
and it let's you see exactly what's happening.
The true power of the tone chart,
comes when you're using the red,
green and blue channel in the tone curve.
Anyone who has used the RGB tone curve,
will remember that when they first tried to use it,
how everything just doesn't really seem to make sense.
They're creating things, and it all seems very random.
But now, you have this tone chart,
you can see exactly what colors you're getting,
and where the color is appearing in your photo.
So, now that you know how this works,
lets learn how to create the chart.
Instead of creating a bunch of rectangles,
we're going to do something better.
And we're going to just add a black to white gradient.
Go to the tool bar,
and select the rectangular marquee tool.
Drag to create a rectangular selection, like this.
You don't need to make it as high as mine,
but, for this tutorial,
I'm going to make it a little bit bigger,
so it's easier for you to see.
Now, we need to add the gradient fill layer.
You won't find this in the adjustment panel,
because it's not technically an adjustment layer.
Its actually a fill layer.
You can find it in your layers panel,
by clicking on this new fill or adjustment layer button.
And on the top, you'll find the gradient fill layer.
Right away, don't confuse this with the gradient map.
Those are two completely different things.
So, make sure that you're adding a gradient fill layer,
and not a gradient map adjustment layer.
In the preset picker, select the black to white gradient.
Change the angle to zero, click "Ok",
and you'll get a horizontal gradient like this.
Next, add a posterize adjustment layer.
You can find this in the same menu
that we used earlier in the layers panel.
Or, you can select it in the adjustment panel.
If you don't see this panel,
you can find it by going to "window", "adjustments".
With this adjustment,
you can limit your image to a number of tonal areas.
For example, if we set this to three,
we'll get black, gray, and white.
If we set it to five,
we'll have blacks, shadows, midtones, highlights and whites.
You can increase this even more if you want to.
But, I generally like to start off at around five or seven.
Also, you want to keep this number an odd number,
and the reason for that,
is so that you always have a 50% gray color in your chart.
Right now, the posterize adjustment
is affecting the entire image.
To make it, so it only affects the gradient,
click on this button here.
This basically clips the adjustment to the layer below it.
We're done creating the gradient,
so now lets move onto a tone curve.
In your adjustments panel, click on your curves adjustment.
Note that there are four channels in this tone curve.
The RGB channel, red, green, and blue.
To show you what it's doing,
let me drag the channels panel out like this.
Basically the channels in this tone curve,
targets the channel in your image.
So, the red channel in the tone curve,
will affect the red channel in your photo.
Same with the green and blues.
For the RGB channel,
it's actually affecting all three channels at once.
If you don't know how channels affect your image,
then click on this video,
to learn more about channel contrast.
It's something that everyone who uses the tone curve,
needs to know.
Were done with the layer setup,
now it's time to play with the tone curves.
Lets start with the RGB channel.
Click on this button here,
to use the auto select targeted adjustment tool.
This is a long name, but its pretty simple.
And what this tool let's you do,
is it let's you create,
and change points on your tone curve,
simply by dragging the tonal area that you want to adjust,
like this.
Drag vertically to change these settings.
As you do this, you'll see the changes being made live
in your tone curves panel.
This is a great way to learn and understand
how the tone curve works.
When you're done, you can switch
to a red, green, and blue channel.
Select any one of these channels,
and try dragging on the middle of the chart,
to see what colors you can get.
For example, if we go to the red channel,
and drag this upward like this,
we'll tint the image red.
If we drag it down,
we'll tint it the opposite color,
which is teal.
Keep playing with these settings,
until you get something that you like.
So there you have it,
we now know how to create effects using the tone curve.
The tone chart, makes using the tone curve way easier.
And, it gives you a visualization
of the effect that you're creating.
But, there's another benefit,
and this is more for advanced users.
If you look at the tone curve,
you'll notice that horizontal position of your points,
they're all evenly spaced out.
You can even go into different channels,
and the horizontal position will match each other.
This is important once you start getting
into more advanced tone curve techniques.
But, those are for another video.
To end this tutorial,
let me show you some examples of effects I created,
using this technique.
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- Hey guys, thanks for checking out my video!
I hope you liked it!
Now, there's so much more you can do with the tone chart.
You can replicate effects,
like if you saw a photo online,
and you liked the way that the photographer processed it,
you can use this technique to replicate
their effects with very accurate results.
Other things you can do,
is you can compress your layers down,
so if you made a photo effect with five or ten layers,
you can compress it down into a single
tone curves adjustment using this technique.
You can also do this in Lightroom.
But, I'll be teaching you guys more about tone curves,
and the tone charts, in future videos.
So, if you're interested,
make sure you hit the "subscribe" button below.
Anyways, thanks for watching guys,
I hope you have an awesome week,
and make sure you click the "like" button,
if you like the video.
And, let me know what you think in the comments.
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