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Lesson Info

Adjusting with Curves

So I was asking all earlier. You're all familiar with Kurt Stool and everyone was sort of going I'm What is it you don't understand about it because you're all kind of hesitant to say that you use it. I would say yesterday you were breaking it down by color channels, and I haven't done that before. We're looking at, like to do tightening. Okay, Yeah, and also for me, reading the faded back hissed a gram that's in the curves, right? And reading that in relationship to that to the line and to the dots that you place right, like I say, is kind of you want a bit more control over what you're doing? Um, typically, I think people find it a little bit Army trip because, you know, it's kind of it's a weird interface, really. It's It's a square box of the line in the middle. Okay, so let's go through coastal. So if you want to open up the files so everybody who's bought the course has got these student France to work with on, you'll find a folder called One Heifer curves, inside of which are th...

ree PSD files. So let's start with one um hi. From contrast PSD, right? If you all got this file yet, switch my keyboard. Okay, So what we got here is a very flat file. This is actually an HDR file. The reason I'm using it is because it has a very low tonal range. So tell me about history. If you're watching online, open up your hissed a gram. Because this is kind of crucial for editing with the curse tool. We're going to keep it on on history. Graham on. We're gonna be looking at the changes that were making and reference to the instagram. So somebody tell me about history. What? It's saying, a lot of the highlights as well as a lot of the dark is lost in the image is pretty much all in. It's not lost in the sense that Samaritan was there, and now it's gone. But it's just not that right? Yeah. Okay. What about these two spikes here? What? They're telling us there's a lot of concentration around the colors around that specific midtown where that big pique is. Yeah. Okay. So if you remember, yes, when we're talking about yesterday over the left, this graham is black over on the right is white in the middle has been great. We'll talk about numbers at some point in terms of folks. Shop black zero White is 255 on mid grades, 1 to 8. It's a kind of this is the midpoint on. We've got a big clump of stuff that's a bit brighter than that. So that's gonna be something like 1 61 50 on. We've got another Columbus to the left of it. A slightly darker, dark and band. So that's what That's kind of what you can see in the image. Now, how many of you used the levels? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was putting a hand up. Right. Let's have a quick look at the levels told one of things we'd be doing is the Levels Tall was a good one for this image. I would be kind of pulling in the white point there on pulling in the Black Point slider on a If you look at the history of top new, you see what we've done? Is he stretched out, hissed a gram. So I turned the levels of Justin off. We've got this compressed. Mr Graham, attorney on. We've extended it on if you get these lines. That abandon here is because we're working with an eight bit image of the stage is a kind of low rez eight bit file. Just so they open quickly, quickly on click the warning scenario, redrawing the screen for us. So with the Levels tool, we've expanded the tonal range. So let's talk a little bit. Right numbers. You'll see that move back point side of 32. What does that mean? What's the What's the effect of that? You're saying that instead of black being zero, it's now 32. Yeah, So anything within the image that was 32 will be low has now become a black because there wasn't anything below 32. We've reset the black point on the same at the other end of the white point. It's a kind of the brightest pixel in the original images. About 100 and 92. We've now shifted that value 2 to 55 So we've got the We got the important airport values here, so search to go to 0192255 against That makes sense, isn't it? Yeah. On the other control, we have re levels is kind of this midpoint slider so way alter the brightness. But we're not altering the endpoints. Okay, so for this sort of image, the levels told isn't too bad because you look control. Let's say we started with the image of this point on. So that's one way of doing that is let's flatten the engine. So here's the image that we started with now Does it have enough? Published is ever enough contrast. Can we add any contrast with the levels? Yes, yes, yes, yes, we can. Right. Let's have a look. So what we can do is we could do the same thing again. We can put in the white point and we can put in the black point. Does he mean look better now? Yes. They don't rot. McCabe. Look at history. What we have either In name black thing. What's this line telling us? Black clipping black clipping on Was this one of your tellers highlight clipping so we can make you look better. But to do that because we pulled in the end points again, we sacrifice detail. So if we think about the original image we started with finding my curses golden there is. We can kind of pull this in because we have this flat image to start with if we have an image that is a normal distribution from zero right through 2 to 55 or thereabouts, pulling these endpoints in throwing away detail now the kind of small changes in this case. But if we want to increase the contrast look. But more what you'll see is we start leaves a significant detail so I could get a bit more pop. But you'll notice. Now we've got this huge white splotchy up here on. So if you look at info palette all across there, it's just straight values of 255 when you're reading the values we talked about North being black to 55 being white with a color images. Three values is the red, green, blue. So white is 255255255 black 000 So if we pull these points in too far with the lovers tool or we're doing is just throwing away data, Okay, so let's go back to this image. So this is the one that we've adjusted on its no kind of a reason. Normal distribution on there's a little bit space the end here so we can't make significant improvements with 11 stool on without clipping some of the detail on on Jim Cummins. Reiterate, I'm going quite quickly through this. If people online and got questions, throw them out on a Winston was go along like yesterday. I'd rather have a chat back. This may just sit here talking forever, Ellie asks. What is clipping clipping is in this case, if we look at the history Graham on, if I turn this levels adjustment off, you'll see all the data is contained within this hissed a gram. Eso There's no very deep blacks on were just touching the edge here, which means is just a few very bright white highlights. The image. If I drank these points in further what you'll notice at the edge of the Instagram, you get kind of this compression, so I either it flattens up against it or you get a spike at the edge. Now clipping is when you discard data, so this area here now has become all white. I turned the levels adjustment off this information in there, but by adding this levels adjustment, I've clipped the detail. So we're kind of blown the highlights by using the levels talked about contrast on the same at the other end off this to Graham in and amongst here you'll find So there is a value that 000 darkest pit. Now we were thrown away. Data in the shadows in the highlights clipping is losing data either in a restaurant. Yeah, you're clear on That's all mixed up. Okay, Another, just a quick question from Kitten is what is the little exclamation point that you get there one second, the the hissed a gram kind of redraws itself as you go along, but it's not always entirely accurate. You'd think with the parent factual has now it would refresh itself automatically, but it's just telling you that it's using cash data on for the history. So it's kind of an approximation of where you're at, so you'll notice. There it popped up and said on Click this coming uncashed data. So when I click that it accurately assesses the image and draws a completely accurate instagram, so it's no warning. You need to worry about just warning, hissed a grams kind of lagging behind where you're up to. So, yeah, sometimes it's worth clicking. See where you're going, right? Okay, so let's get rid of that levels adjustment. Delete. So what can we do with a curves adjustment? Instead, let's start taking like a curse tour. Okay, One of things that puts people off with Kirsten. It's really not clear what you're looking at. You got this box and you got this line. Let's look at it as though it waas the levels talk. So this point at the top here is the white point. Sorry. Find drank this towards the left. What you'll see is the image is becoming brighter. And again, you'll notice that we're clipping the highlights in this area here. So this dragging this point across are using the little triangle down here is equivalent to the white point slide in the levels tool. The same for this little black one here. This is kind of like the black point slider with the levels. Okay, Like since there's no midpoint slide with a curse tool on, because what we have to do is we have to add an extra point to the curve. So if I click on the curve. I cannot appoint there in the middle. If I drag that towards the top left, you'll notice image gets brighter. If I dragon dance wants the bottom right, it gets darker. What you'll notice when you move the line is there's a line here in the middle. Is this the one you were talking about? This line in the middle, right? Okay, yes, yes, brothers, that kind of thing. The intersection light. So it's kind of like a base point, or it's the baseline for the curve that you can move, you can move the curve away from. So if I'm going down towards the bottom, right, things getting darker, I'm going towards the top left things getting lighter. So any position on this curve that is towards the left or the top from this intersection line is now brighter. So what this means is other. We haven't moved the white black point, but we have lightened every pixel. So the mid tones more than shadows because it's further away from the line on it gets less and less and less to get the white point, unless unless, unless gonna get back point, we're going the opposite direction when it gets dark. Yeah. So how do we adjust this images in the camp of all used cursed or what? Watch what we're gonna be doing with this curve. To add some contracts to this image, I would say would be moving in both the far points up to where the the they did is in history. Graham. Okay, so can we move this point? The white point? Yes, I'm welcoming. Moving to I would have to move it towards the where actually with Instagram actually has data, right? Okay, Farther. We're looking now at this history in the background. This sister Graham in the background is Grable on matches this one up here. I don't tend to use the one in the background because I don't find it. I'm really helpful. It's kind of a nice visual reference. It was added in with folks shop See us? Something on it Didn't always wasn't always there, but this one is the one that's more useful. So let's just refresh that again. OK, so we have got a little bit of leeway there. You can see that way. Haven't clicked the highlights. One way to check is to hold down the old key and click on the little one arrow. And what What you get is kind of this black mask on to turn you white dots. I don't even see those online on what they're telling us. What are those little white dots? Tell us there was data through quip. That's where it's clipped. So by bringing the point in that far clips a handful pictures. Where you clicking? I'm clicking the little whites. I'm holding in the old key on the option key, and I'm clicking era about that. Okay, so we've got a tiny bit clipping. Perhaps we don't worry about that. So what we gonna do with the black point? What's the same? Yes. Okay, so let's bring that in, um, again we can click. So it new shows white. There's no clipping. So if you go a bit further yeah, okay, that you can use the arrow keys as well to move to move these points you can see now I'm not sure. The shop online. Can you see the yellow at the bottom? The screen there that's showing shadow clipping in those areas. So let's let's take that back a little bit. Um and still a little bit at the bottom, but made making the sacrifice a few pixels. Right? Okay, So does it look better then? It did. For then there's a curtain on this curve turned off. There's an improvement. Is there enough contrast there? I think. Right. Okay, So what else can we do with this curve? To add some more contracts, you can add a NASCAR. You can have a net skirt. So 11 of the standard shapes for a curve that's really useful is what's called the S s curve. So you have a curve shaped like an X. So to do that, we need to have to control points. Eso if we had one here on, we move the curve like this and we had another one here. Move the curve like that. Does the image that better? Right, So we've added this s shape. So what this is done is it's moved the highlight detail on towards the top left of the Kurds dialogue. So it's moving in a wine from this line. So it is moving in the towards the top left, which makes it brighter on the opposite side. We've moved the shadow detail darker so we could weaken hope. Spent injured 30 points. So we can kinda steep in itself as much as we like. Now this is overdone name. So there's this kind of too much contrast image on Let's bring it back a little bit. But what? You'll notice If you look at the history Graham is, we still have pretty much still in of all our data. Still that black point back a bit, right, since I have a go so we can have a huge amount of contrast without losing any dates or without losing a significant amount. It's a kind of that is why the curse tool and is way more useful than levels. Because we start off with an image. It's reason normally distributed without clicking any detail at all. We're not messing. That contrast. Yeah, I tend to use. I use occurs tool, and then I tend to go to the levels tool to work with the mid tones. But you don't you don't need to say we wanted this amount contrast, but we want the midterms brighter. All we need to do is move both these points across, so we commit image. Bryant so we've affected the Midtown's. We've still got the same amount contrast, and we just move these two points. Now. One thing is worth mentioned, although I do do quite heavy postproduction. What you should be aiming for is the minimum number of changes you could get away with. What you don't want to be doing is stacking adjustments on top of each other and in tonight, because the more you do, the more you risked a great image. I never used level store because there's no need to. I want her to cut the cursed tall, described as like a level tool levels to on steroids. You can easily do everything level store does with curves, but it's infinitely more flexible. We had it a couple control points. Here, you can add up to 15 s, so you know you can add in adding loads more, more points here. I'm normally working with two points is probably the best way to go If you want to Money. We're weird. Things kind of start happening. If I flatten this line off here, you see, now we get a very muddy, muddy area across there. Let's just make sure we understand this Let's delete these control points. How do you do? You can either reset the curve altogether. So if you go to the little menu that you can reset curves and it gets rid of all of them. If you want to get rid of one, just click it and then hit the delete key, right? So let's just reset this curve back to where we started. If I flip this curve round on, so if I move this point here to the top on the white point down to the bottom, what's gonna happen? What would you do? We're seeing that. Yeah, OK, so let's do that. Because black there on it goes, invest there. That wasn't doing that. What we don't You've told the whites to be zero on the blacks to be up to 50 so we took. So we got an output value of zero when the inputs to 557 it was white becomes black and vice versa. It would move this point here. How can we use this curve to create a black and white image? What would we need to do to make it black and white? It's kind of a trick a slightly trick question. So shape, I'll show you. Okay if I put that line there, I put it there. There you go. Back way to convert. What we've done now is every single value in this image has been re mapped. Oneto. So the whites want to write the Black Swan two right turns one toe, everything toe. You know you're never gonna do that. It's not sensible. All you're doing with this line is you re mapping numerical values. So the mathematicians love coastal. If you don't want to do the math, you don't have to do. That's on. But it's really handy tool to use a case. That's kind of the basic stuff it has doing online. Any questions that Yeah, question from D C. Photo than some other folks that asked as well. So how do you decide where to put that the points? Okay, we're coming. We're coming to that in a moment. Okay? Next next image will do that. And thats all clear for you guys. It is one questions when it comes to actually clipping the number of pixels, both either from the highlights or from in the shadows. Do you have any kind of rule of thumb as to what you would consider acceptable. There's two ways of thinking minutes. What What I never want to do with an image is inadvertently threw away day to the right to keep, um, But you may be shooting a low key portrait, for example, where the background is nearly black and you wanted to all go black so you could be clipping data across 90% image so that there's a creative element here as well. But what you what you need to avoid is sacrificing detail that you want to keep. So for this image, I wouldn't want to be losing determined claims. So using the Levels tour just having big, white, flat areas appear, you know, it's kind of unacceptable. If there's no clicking to start with, you can use the curse tool, and there'll be no clicking When you finished, we didn't move the white, the black point. We wouldn't have to with this image. You kind of have these points in, um, and I'm making this looking music some used to using a tool. I will show you in a minute to evaluate image, but I can kind of increase the contrast there. There's no clicking whatsoever because we have a way of white black points. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, right. Let's move on to the next image then, because the question there was, how would you evaluate how well the question waas home Do you decide where you gonna put these points? So if you open up, the 2nd 1 was called to I dropping PSD. You'll see It's our friend from yesterday looking moderately threatening today on I've gone to black and white just so just so we can think about the values in this image, right? So we're gonna do is we'll ignore the two curves and got there will come back, stays in a while and will create another cares adjustment so we could do much the same as we did with the previous image. We could have some control points and we could increase the contrast on a Let's look at her. We can work with us in a little slightly more sophisticated. If you have version, I think CS for RCs three and above you will have a little hand symbol at the top left. Here. You won't go. Okay. Click on that on. Then you'll see. When you go back to the image that your cursor changes to a little, I drop it all. If you move this around the image, you'll see a white circle appears on the line of the curve. Yeah, what's it telling us? What does that circle tell us? That's the point. The control point. That's where the control point, that's where the control point would go in terms of what? What's it evaluating? Yeah, I've gone to black and white, so we're just thinking about light and dark. So, you know, if I hover over the background here because it's not quite black, it's been down right? The bottom left the curve. If I hover over one of the kind of the brights areas of the hair, you can see it's going up towards the top, right? So what this tool does is allows us to evaluate an image. Now, when we look to the previous image off the bike, what's you'll notice? When we had the s curve that some of the curve flattens off, some of it is steeper on it flattens off again at the bottom. Now, the key thing in terms of contrast is the steep of the curve. So you know, the greater the angle near to the near vertical, it gets the more contrast to introduce. So if we wanted to really emphasize the detail around his eye, where would we re putting control points? Can you see kind of the range? There was your hover around one. It's kind of all around the midterm values. It's kind of going down to round about there a little bit lower. It's going up to kind of that, Yeah, So if I had to control points, if what I can do is wait for finding a bright. But I can click on that as a control point on. If I find a doctor bit, I can play can have another control point Now. What those points represents is the area of tonal range here. Yeah, so if I want to increase the tonal range, bring out detail, I could be that one that way. So that's bright Ning. The lights spits, and I could do this one that way, and that's dark in the darkest bits. You can kind of see now if I turned out later on off, kind of really emphasized this detail around his eyes here. So, Jim, does that answer the question? You think? Yes, I believe it does. Yeah. Yeah. Is that working for you? Right. Okay. Can I just ask you about Somebody had asked earlier about they were taught to drag up and down, but they're saying that you're dragging those points diagonally. Is there a difference? No, not really. You can go up and down on what? That if you go up and down, your input value will stay constant and you don't put valuable change. But really, what you're doing is you kind of just moving these points and agree. So if you move both changing kind of import in the airport, So if you've assessed on input value off something and you want to keep that the same change the airports than going up and down would make more sense. I kind of think what you're really doing is you're looking at the image on your evaluating changing. It makes so using the eyedropper is a good way of kind of picking at the area. Um, but you don't you don't need to. You don't need to be religious and going up then you kind of maintain the values. If you do, it is not central. Don't think. Okay, so on. Here we go. So you got a similar result. That Yeah, right, Kate. So delete those points on this time we found something pretty about one second. So we bring out the detail around his eyes. What happens to detail his head when we do this, do we increase detailers head? Yeah. No, no, right. We're losing the details. Hair. So delete both those points on. Tell me where the points are gonna go If we want to bring out the detail in his hair, right. Brightness in his hair around 200. We're gonna need to point some way Steep, steep in the line to adjust his hair. So roughly where he's gonna be What's it gonna look like? Yeah, to find fish between, like 1 72 100 right? Yeah. So I kind of in this sort range here if you're looking the curve. So if I had a couple of points here and then another one here and I turned the adjustment layer back home that we always help Yeah, I could emphasize the detail attack because I've evaluated this area vintage on. I've added the steepness somewhere else in the Yeah. Wow. But it kind of doesn't wear the images. A whole now does it, right? No. Yes. No, you know. So what's the problem name we need to do? Well, it's making the rest of it too dark. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to do now. That's kind of a very quick introduction to curse again. If anyone online has any questions on, we'll talk about some refinements of the coastal in a while on. But if anyone has questions from where we got up to so far shared may you guys okay keeping up so a quick ocean from Yeah, we If I've already made some s shaped curve adjustments, should I further use the contrast lighter on my contrast slider? Does he mean the what? The brightness contrast tool? That's where from To get back to something that I'm not sure I understand the question on because there's no contrast slightly within the coastal. But if you mean should he used contrast tool as well as the curse tool, there's no no, because there's no there's no benefit in doing that. You're doing the same thing, but with a different tour on. Yeah, Sergeant, were you gonna say I am? Yeah. Another question Sam Cox asked, Do you ever save and reuse curve settings? Typically? No. Because what you have in front of you is you have an image with its own unique tonal range. Um, so what? What I'm doing is I'm looking at the invasion of working out. What contrast Adjustment needs to be made to that image. If I had images very, very similar, it might make sense on, but typically typically, you're gonna need a different shape curve for every single image. So no, on my tractor is on low battery when he's in batteries. It's very kind of a question from a question from Scott Wood's photography. Could you just show us again how you got the eyedropper value to evaluate the image? Yeah, it's kind of this little hand symbol in the top left of the Kurds dialogue on Normally, when you hovering over the image nothing. Nothing much happens once you click the little hand symbol here on your going over the image, you'll see a circle appear on the curve, the point at which the circle appears represents the total value underneath the eyedropper, So if I'm over a dark area, it's down towards the bottom. It's a very dark pixel, so you could see an important input value of 12. If I go to a brighter area, it's 156 to kind of lands you to evaluate the image and work out where you need to be. Which part of the curve you need to adjust to create additional contrast with practice? You don't really need to do this. You kind of get a good feel for how an image will look and how you can adjust the curve. But if you're unsure, are you specifically wanted to target a specific area of tonal range? It's a it's a really good talk to use.