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How to Use Drastic Tone Curves

Lesson 4 from: Adobe Lightroom 5 Develop Module In-Depth

Jared Platt

How to Use Drastic Tone Curves

Lesson 4 from: Adobe Lightroom 5 Develop Module In-Depth

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

4. How to Use Drastic Tone Curves

Lesson Info

How to Use Drastic Tone Curves

So now let's go into the tone curves because the tone curves are super super awesome seriously love the tone curse so I'm going to go to an image let me take you to, uh, let's let's, go to this image, I really, really like this image, and so we're going to do a tone curve on this image, all right? First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn this the black and white the wiki for victory over color turns at the black and white ok, so the victory um here's our tone curve you can see I've got there's actually two different tone curves inside of light room there's the regular tone curve which just has this highlights lights, darks, shadows and you get to choose so notice right down there is deep, deep, deep, deep shadows, right? So I grabbed that darkened and see how the shadows were getting darker and darker that blue is helping you to see that, but if I go into the darks I could, you know, bring the darks up, bring the darks down, I can kind of play around that I can play around with...

lights, make those little brighter or tone them down, I could take the highlights up so I can play around those things now if I don't know what a specific tone is so I'm going into here and I'm I don't know if that's a highlight or a shadow or whatever I can click on this little thing here zoom in so you can see that see that looks like a target and it's called the target adjustment so I have the ability to target that so I click on it and I get a weird cursor sat cursor it's really weird and if I take my finger and I flick it up or down like this I will get adjustments see out as I go look over there on that tone cursi it's flipping around like that it's telling me where I am on that tone curve and so if I go to this area ceo goes way high because now I'm on the highly lights but if I go here now I'm in the shadows so I'm going to go to this area right here because I don't know that's the midtown and if I then I'm going to zoom out a little bit and if I flick it up it's starting to brighten up see how the darks air brightening brightening up and then and now I'm bringing him down a little bit see that so I'm I'm just doing that with my finger so it's a very easy way to kind of get the right tone and by the way this is also available inside of your when you're in the hse cells it's also right here so if you don't know what color something is, you can point at it and start messing with it and it will start to, for instance, let's in fact, I really need to show you that, so I have no idea what color that isthe right? It's a purplish pinkish I don't know and I don't know which of these colors is exactly that, you know that I don't know which color is represented here by these, so if I click on that little target adjustment and I point at it now when I decide I want this to be a darker shade of that color, all I do is roll my mouse down and see how it starts to darken up and it's darkening both the purple and the magenta see out took purple down by twelve but magenta down by forty seven because that color is somewhere in the middle of these two okay, so very useful tool to be able to figure out what tone something is or what color something is use that little target adjustment tool all right, so back to our other image here let's go back into black and white on going to go back to our tone curve yes go for when you were using your mouse to sort of like poll back and forth between the different tones yeah, if you were using this stylist with a pen, would it work the same way if you can't stylist? So the pen is considered a click when you put shut down, and so if I were to do the same thing, if I do it with my mouse, it goes up in slight increments, it's real subtle if I click and drag up, it goes really it goes like further faster and so with the you're going it's going to consider it a click, so really you have to use the the mouse itself or if you have a pin tool and you put this little dial here on the on your tablet, you can then have that leave the scroll, so you just have to use two hands for it. So it's it's more of a it's, a better mouse function than it is anything so but I always keep my mouse close at hand, so ok, so now the other thing to know about this curve here is that they're these little points right here to see those points, that one and that one. This tells me where the middle is, I'm defining the middle of the curve and aiken slide that around so I can decide that the middle of the curve is not actually here, I'm defining middle gray is right here I can decide that I can also decide what equals highlights and shadows here. And what it's doing is defining these sliders right here. So you can actually define the sliders so that you get to say, I don't think that I want the highlights to start way over here. So now when I take the highlights upscale it's only dealing, you could barely see what's happening on those steps, right? See how they're kind of glowing in and out. Ok, so that's, because it's see how it's on ly changing the curve way up here. But if I define the highlights is starting here, see how the curve changes? So if I start the chi lites down here at middle gray now watch what happens when I play with the highlights. The whole thing starts to move so I can define those anyway, I want just so you know that you could be more subtle, or you could be more drastic about your all right. So let's, let's go in and just reset this whole thing. So if I had the option key this this thing right here on everywhere throughout the developed module, you'll see this. If he had the option to, you can reset the entire region and now everything's back to zero c it's a flat curve. The next thing you can do is instead of being here in the regular kerr very you can go to what's called the point curve and that's here at this point click on the point curve and now it's like photoshopped now it's like the curve area in photo shop, you can take it at a point here, bring it up at a point here bring it down so now, really in backed in that comfortable photo shop area, we're really adjusting these things now again remember I told you at the very beginning of the hour that we want to make sure that you're not doing this every single image because if you are than your back and photo shop land where it takes an hour to work on all your images, you know each image you spend thirty minutes on or whatever wouldn't want to be there and that's why we're going to use our presets so once we come up with a really cool thing that we do, we add a preset so that we never have to do it again we just click and it's done all right, so aiken, add this as a really drastic curve right here let's say that's my curve, but more than that you can also play with your red channel you can play with your green channel and you can play with your blue channel so watch what happens, and right now it looks like I'm split, toning this thing's on and turn the split tony off, by the way. Everywhere inside of light room, see these panels, there's, an on and off switch. You don't have to set. You don't have to take these back to zero to turn them off. If you want to see what it looks like without the setting that you put in there, just turn the panel off, and it will show you the image without that. And if I export that, it exports without that panel running, okay, so I just turned that layer off, so to speak.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Jared Platt - Lightroom Develop Module In-Depth - Reference Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Bill Frye
 

A very informative course dealing with an important module within Lightroom. Significantly improved my comfort with and capabilities in Lightroom.

Raquel
 

Thoroughly enjoyed this package. I learned a lot and found everything Jared explained very useful to me. I'm new to using Lightroom. Thank you!

a Creativelive Student
 

I am only half way thru and I love this class! I knew there was more to LIghtroom and what I could accomplish and Jared did that for me! Big thumbs up for me!

Student Work

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