Inside this Lightroom tutorial, we are going to demystify the tone curve once and for all. We're going to make it super simple, super basic, and super practical, so that even if this tone curve is intimidating to you, confusing, and reminds you of your grade 8 math homework, I got you. We're going to make it basic, simple, practical, and you're going to be so excited to use this tool by the end. You ready?
Let's hit that intro. So let's hop into Lightroom together and get started editing. In front of me, you can see that I've got an image and it's got some basic tone curves applied. And these curves are affecting the image in different ways.
And we're going to explain exactly how to use this. But first, let's talk about the different tools inside the tone curve and why we have so many of these different windows, what they do, what they're for. So let's reset everything here and explain.
First, we've got our two gray curves right here. Those represent all the tones in the image. You can adjust different parts of the image without actually affecting any of the colors.
And then we've got red. green and blue curves. Now in school you were taught that the primary colors probably were red, blue and yellow.
And that was kind of true because when it comes to mixing paints and inks and you're painting on a picture with your fingers as a kindergartner, those are the primary colors, kind of. You sit on a throne of lies. Now when it comes to digital photography we actually use different primary colors. You might be saying, why?
I understand you. It's because the way that the human eye works is we don't see in red, blue and yellow. We actually see in red green, and blue. Those are the photoreceptors in our eyes, and those are the main wavelengths we pick up. And then our eyes kind of combine those to make every conceivable color that you can see.
I get it. So that's why we use that in digital photography. So our cameras capture red, green, and blue light, and then our screens display different combinations of red, green, and blue pixels to make all the colors that you see in an image.
So with that mystery out of the way, let's actually check out how this tone curve works one step at a time. Because even though this seems intimidating, it seems like your grade eight math homework, it's really not that hard. And once you learn to use one of these, because they're all pretty much the same, you'll be able to figure out the rest. So let's start here on a plain black and white image with a plain tone curve just affecting all the colors at once.
And if you want to follow along, I'm going to leave download links to these in the description, so you can actually figure this out on your own and practice on these images with me. We're going to start with the far left, which represents the blacks in our image. And then on the far right is the whites in the image, and we've got this line that represents all the tones in your image without adjusting them at all. Now if we add points along this line anywhere, and we drag those up or down, along that point it's going to start adjusting the brightness of our image, just in that area. So if we take our blacks, and we grab this little point, and we take it up, up, up, up, up, you're going to see it gets brighter and brighter and brighter until we have an all-white image, because everything along this line is now set to 100% brightness.
If I take the white channel over here on the far right, and I click it, and I drag it down, down, down, down, down, you're going to see everything eventually becomes black, because everything along this line is now set to 0% brightness. So that's how this works. We've got 0% brightness at the bottom.
100% brightness at the top, then we've got this weird diagonal line, which is obviously confusing. Why is it a diagonal line? Blank. I don't...
I don't understand. I got you. It's because our mid-tones are right here in the image. They're at 50%.
That's kind of the 50% brightness mark, right? And our blacks are at 0% brightness. Now, blacks can't get any darker than black, so they have to be all the way down, and you can't adjust them. any further down. Whites have to be at 100% because you can't adjust them any more bright, and you can only adjust them down.
So that's why we've got this weird diagonal line. It's just the way that color and tones and brightness works. You can't make something brighter than white.
You can't make it darker than black. So now let's look at how we can adjust different things other than just the black point and the white point in our image. The easiest way is to grab this little tool right here.
It's a little point clicker tool. You click it once and then you can grab any part of your image and you can see this line is adding little points here. And if I click, it's going to add different points as I click these different sections of light.
This is really handy because we can go into our image, grab a specific spot and say, okay, this spot here, these gray tones, I want to just make them darker. Perfect. Easy.
And then let's say I want to add a little bit of color here. I wanna make these highlights just less bright. So let's make those darker all the way down if you want to.
And then let's take our shadows over here and let's make them brighter. And then let's take our blacks, make those kind of like a gray. So by doing this, we can adjust very specific parts of the image and we can dial them in exactly where we want. And so you might have the question or been asking before, why would I use the tone curve when I can just do everything I want to up here with the highlights and the shadows, the whites, the blacks, it's kind of the same, isn't it, Ryan? Well, sort of, in the way that a chainsaw and a chisel are the same.
Because with these tones up here, it's like we're painting with a really broad brush. Whereas if we go down here into the tone curve, we can grab a very specific shade of gray and adjust that up or down. And then this shade right next to it, we can make that a little bit darker.
And the shade right next to that, we can adjust in its own way. So we can really dial things in and get super specific about what we're doing. So the last question you might have is, Ryan, why are there two gray curves here? Why not just one? And the reason is, this first one on the far left has some pre-assigned points that just make it...
Really easy to adjust the basics in our tone curve that we're going to be using all the time. So our highlights, our lights, our darks, we can adjust those really quickly and really simply using these different sliders. And we can still go in here with the point tool and it will tell us, oh, that's part of the lights. And you can drag that up or down. So we can do that with our images and adjust them and get them dialed in.
And then our point curve right here lets us add super specific adjustments to specific areas. So if I grab that same point curve and I click on different parts of the image, you're going to see I can adjust any part of the image that I want to. rather than just those broad areas.
So again, this is a broader brush, this is a more specific brush, and you can combine them together to get more options and tools in your tool belt. Okay, so now you kind of understand that, but it's sort of like I just put your mouth up to a fire hose and just let it all out. So let's look at some real life examples and kind of let you play and figure this out for yourself. So let's start here and let's just work with our basic tones for starters, and then we'll go into our color tones and show you some different techniques. The first thing we're going to do is just adjust this image overall as it just showed you.
So let's grab our highlights because those are a little bit too bright and bring those back. Let's just say we want to recover some contrast in the highlights. Then let's grab our darks.
They're looking pretty dark, so I'm going to bring those darks up somewhere around there. That's feeling much better. And now we can add some lights because we maybe want a little more contrast in the waterfall.
And we can grab our shadows and make those just a little bit darker, and that'll add some pop to our image. So what we've done here is make things brighter and also add some contrast back to the image. Now, why would you do that instead of just adding contrast to the image?
As we said before, if I add contrast to the image like this, it's going to make the brights brighter and the darks darker. And in this case, in this image, you can see it worked in the brights. The highlights look okay, but the darks, we've completely lost them. They've become pure black.
Whereas if we go into our tone curve, we can choose to just make the highlights brighter and then leave the darks alone. So we've added contrast without kind of messing things up. So we can get really specific about where we're adding contrast rather than just adding it to the entire image. So let's hop over here into the point curve and do something similar.
So grab this little point curve tool. Let's select our subject and say we want this area of the image to be brighter. So let's brighten up this area. And then the waterfall itself, maybe I want that to be a little bit brighter as well.
So that's probably around here. So I'll click it and drag it up. Now you can also just do this by clicking on the tone curve and dragging it around.
It's just a little more intuitive to grab the part of the image you want to adjust and Lightroom will tell you where you need to adjust. Now let's make our darks a little bit brighter because that's feeling slightly too dark. And now that we've done that, let's find the blackest part of our image, like the ultra, ultra shadows, probably over on this rock.
Let's make that just a little bit darker. You're going to see we've added so much pop to our image while also brightening it at the same time. We're covering a lot of detail that wasn't there before.
It looks great. Now, that was all just with the tone curve. We didn't have to do anything else.
Let's hop over into another image and show you another way you might use the tone curve, which is to selectively correct things. So here's a nice photo on the Oregon coast. And you can see this little person standing here on this natural arch.
Really cool. So I can grab my point selector. I can go up here to the brightest part, the whites up here in the sky, and I can grab it and bring it down and recover that sky, right?
Oh, that looks horrible. Why does it look horrible? And you might find this when you're practicing the tone curve is one, a little goes a long way. So you never want to try and adjust it like that.
First, you would start by using your master adjustments up here, recover your highlights like that. It's easier. It's preset.
And then I would grab my shadows and make those lighter because I know I'm going to have to make that adjustment. And then probably dial back on the contrast overall. And Now the image looks good in terms of I haven't lost any detail, but obviously it looks really flat. We've lost so much contrast.
Ah, that's another thing we can use the tone curve for. So we can go in here, and I'm going to grab kind of the darks of the image, like the darkest point. So find those shadows right there. And I'm going to bring that down.
Voila. And then I'm going to grab kind of the brightest point of the image. Let's say this sky right here is looking bright because it's sunset. I'm going to grab this, and I'm going to make it brighter.
Voila. So we've added contrast back into our image, but we've still... made the shadows brighter.
We're slowly adding contrast back in, but really selectively exactly where we want it to be. So let's say we still want to make this kind of area a little bit darker. We can add another point, bring that down. Okay.
We've added some, and let's say I want to recover these highlights up here, bring that down just a little bit. And if you're finding that it's really hard to make small adjustments, just hold the option or alt key on your keyboard. And that should allow you to make smaller adjustments, or you can actually go over here to this little point. Now that we've added it, just hover on top. When you hover on top, you can actually use your arrow keys up and down, and that will let you manually dial this in.
Because the one thing about using the tone curve that can be really tricky is that finding a specific adjustment and grabbing it, sometimes you'll accidentally add a point right next to it. So let's reset this. Here's our before.
Here's our after. We've recovered a lot of detail. So again, if you want to practice for yourself, grab the description link below, and you can download these images to play. Okay, let's look at one more example.
Here's Mr. Monkey, and I'm going to grab him. He's kind of a mid-tone-y kind of guy, so we'll grab his fur here on this one side. Perfect, and I've brightened that up. I've added some contrast without blowing out our whites too bad. But we've also sort of made our brights too bright.
So I'm going to go into this section here, and I'm just going to... Select it and make it a little bit darker. And you can't push it too far because as this line gets kind of wonky, it's a sure sign that you've gone too far and that things are going to look weird. So you always want that line to stay left to right, kind of diagonal.
You can just adjust it along this line. So I'm going to add that point just like that. And this time I'll work just here on the tone curve panel instead of on the overall image.
And then probably I could make the shadows a little bit darker. So I'll grab a shadow point, go in here. And then, very last of all, I'm maybe going to add a little bit of a fade to this image.
Let's say I want to make more of a vintage look. Well, I can grab the white point of this photo and take it down, down, down. You're going to see that the whites over here are going from more of a pure white to a nice bright gray.
And in this case, it actually looks pretty good because our whites don't really look very nice. We've got this weird banding. It's kind of blown out.
But as I grab that, bring it down, it kind of makes them buttery and smooth. So this is a technique, if you ever have a blown out sky, it'll make it much, much more smooth and just feel better. We can use this later on in our skin tones and you're going to see it's an amazing trick for recovering skin tones and smoothing them out, especially when you have really harsh lighting. I can do the same thing here with our black point.
I can grab the blacks, make them brighter, brighter, brighter, and now we've added a fade to the image, kind of more like a vintage-y vibe, and we can dial that in to exactly where we want it, say around there. So here's tone curve before and after. That's all we've used in this image.
And I can keep messing things around until I'm happy with where the image is at, but hopefully by now you're kind of getting a handle on, okay, that's how I use this main tone curve here. Now, Ryan, what's the point of the red, the green, and the blue? Well, it's just specific colors in our image. So I've got my different colored curves here.
I can actually go in here and just selectively add color to different tones in the image. So instead of adjusting the greens overall, like I would with the saturation slider here in the HSL panel, which is going to adjust the highlights, the shadows, and mid-tones all the same amount, I can go here, I can grab my green channel, and I can just go in here and select, say, just the darkest part of the greens. So like this part right here. And I want to maybe make them a little bit more green, just in the darkest parts.
So I can add that channel, drag it just a little bit up. You can see if I go really hard, I'm going to add green everywhere. But just a little bit, we're going to get a bump of green just in the darkest parts of the shadows. Whereas if I don't want green in the highlights, maybe I want them to be a little bit more magenta, I want to take green out. I can click on the highlight greens, let's say right here, grab those, make them a little bit more magenta.
And you can do the same thing by hopping into the blue channel and say, you know what, I want really warm, buttery yellow highlights. Okay, good. Go in here, grab a highlight part of the blues, and drag that down. You're going to see that's going to get a warmer and warmer kind of color to it until it looks absolutely ridiculous, but you can go as far as you want.
So let's go right in there. And what's so cool about the tone curve is let's say I want this kind of the same curve, the same adjustment in different parts of the image, different parts of the curve. I can go in here, right-click, and go Copy Channel Settings.
Go over to the greens and say, you know what, I want the same tone curve in the blues and the greens. I can right-click and go Paste Channel Settings. Okay, now that doesn't seem super handy, does it?
Well, it turns out that this is really handy once we use a basic curve. So if I go in here and I take my shadows down and I take my highlights up, you're going to see that our tone curve is adding a lot of contrast. And if you look at this shape of the tone curve, that's actually shaped a little bit like a sideways S, which is why we would call this an S curve. That's what you do to add contrast to your image.
You take the shadows down, and you take the highlights up. And then the mid-tones, you can kind of figure out what you want to do in between. In this case, I'd probably lift the mid-tones, and Mr. Monkey just pops right out. So here's before, and here's after.
We've added contrast with an S-curve. Now this is cool and all, but what if I want to adjust a specific part of this image now with our main curve? Ah, well we can actually right-click this channel, go Copy Channel Settings, and reset the channel. Then I'm going to select each of these, the red channel, and go Paste Channel Settings. The green channel, go Paste.
channel settings. And at this point, the image looks really weird. But if I paste the exact same channel across the red, the green, and the blue, because all those together make white, they're the primary colors, we should have an image that is adding the exact same tone curve without making any adjustments to the independent colors. And what's so cool about this is now that I have this exact same S curve across each of these channels, I can go in and make some tweaks.
So let's say I want the highlights to be a little bit cooler. Let's just grab this little dot right here, drag it up just a little bit. Now, if you hover over this again, you can actually use your up and down arrow keys, and that will make that adjustment a little bit easier for you. So I'm gonna hover over, make them just a little bit colder. And then let's say I want the shadows to be nice and warm, I'm gonna hover over the shadow point in the blues, make them just a little bit warmer.
And you can see Lightroom's actually added blue on this side and yellow on this side, so you can see what you're doing. You're either adding blue when you adjust this channel, or you're taking blue away, which is going to result in yellow. So that's what's happening when you're making these adjustments.
So that's trick number one when it comes to using these guys, is to actually use them. like an S-curve, but make sure you just copy paste and then make specific adjustments based on that overall curve. Let's make some basic edits with our master tone curve, maybe raise our shadows, lower our highlights a little bit. Okay, so we've made those adjustments and And I'm still feeling pretty dark in this section of the image, so we'll brighten that up. We've definitely made some progress.
And then we can go in here and maybe add some color toning to the image. So let's say we want to make the sunset pop a little bit more, a little bit more vibrant. Well, probably the way to do that would be by grabbing our mountains, add a point right here, and just add some blue right to that part of the mountains. Then the sky here is kind of more of a yellowish orange, so we can actually take some blue out of the highlights. That will give us some more yellow in the sky.
Then we can do the same thing in our greens. Probably we take some green out of the sky. That'll give us a richer red. So this is an extreme example.
I would never take it quite that far. However, you can see how we can really dial in and add color selectively using these red, green, and blue channels. So again, you might be wondering, why would I use these curves when I actually have a color mixer channel and I have a color grading channel? Why wouldn't I just use those to affect the mid-tones and the highlights and the shadows?
And the reason is, once again, control. It's just having more tools in your tool chest. You can go in here, you can add some selective color grading using your grading.
But if I want... to add say blue to just part of the highlights and take it out of the shadows, I can't really dial that in the same way as when I have my tone curves. So that's why you would sometimes use the tone curves over the color grading and the HSL panel and vice versa.
Just because you can do something in the tone curve doesn't always mean it's the best recipe. It's just sometimes a very handy tool. So let's look at one of these situations where using the tone curve might make more sense than using color grading or the color mixer.
So one favorite tweak I have when using the red, the green, and the blue channels in our tone curves is to go in here and just make our highlights a little bit more blue, just like that, and make our shadows a little bit more green. So I'm going to take the green channel, grab the blacks, and raise it up. And then I can go into the red channel, and I can mess around, maybe make the shadows more of a teal color.
And that's how you can get that orange and teal look without using the color grading panel. But by doing this, we've added a very subtle kind of grade to our image. And I like to just have that as a default sometimes.
So I'm going to grab my image, maybe make the shadows a little bit brighter, the whites a little bit darker, give us a nice creamy highlight up here in the corner if I grab that white point down. And here's before and after. We've added some color.
dial in our contrast and voila, all with ToneCurve. That's all we had to use. So can you see how handy this tool can be in certain situations?
It's not the go-to for everything when it comes to Lightroom. Still using your main adjustments panel could be helpful and handy and a lot faster, but when it comes to specific adjustments, making very specific changes to your colors, very, very handy. Let me show you one more trick with the ToneCurve that I think is more of an advanced move that will definitely make a massive difference in your photos. Now the lighting you can see, not so beautiful. In fact, I'd say it's terrible.
We've got really bright highlights on the skin, really dark shadows. It just does not look good. So let's start by just dialing in the basic settings. We'll get our white balance right. We'll drop the contrast down, lower the highlights.
That's looking better, but not perfect. Here's an amazing trick you can use the tone curve for to fix skin tones. I'm going to grab a mask up here. I'm going to go select people. Lightroom is going to think for a little bit.
It's going to find all the people in the image. And then I don't want to select the entire person. I just want to select their skin because that's the area I'm having an issue with in this photo. I'm gonna go create mask and I've got a nice skin mask.
And I've got my tone curve here. And I can actually go in here and adjust the contrast on this image. Because what's going on when you think about it?
We've got hot spots on the photo, on his forehead, on her face. And then we've got dark shadows under the eyes. It's really harsh light. But if we bring the shadows up and we bring those highlights down, you're gonna see we get kind of this gray tone. We're losing contrast in the image.
And we can actually use that strategically if we don't push it too, too far to really smooth things out in the skin. and get nice, rich, buttery skin tones without absolutely ruining the image overall. So I'm gonna dial this in, taking my mid-tones up a little bit, my shadows up a little bit, and then we can actually grab this white point and bring it down and see what happens to the hotspots on their foreheads as I'm doing that. It's making it dark.
And it looks a little bit like almost bluish green, so we're gonna add some color in a second. But first, we'll just dial in the skin just like that. So here's the curve before and after.
So we've really smoothed out the skin. We've raised up the shadows a little bit. We can probably push those a little bit further.
We can do the same thing with the blacks if we wanted, just a little bit. So you want to be subtle with this. I've probably gone too far, but I'm just showing you the technique, right? So now that we've smoothed out the skin, let's add some color back in because it's looking pretty washed out. We lost that nice glow to their skin.
That skin should have if it's alive and healthy. So let's go in here to our red point. We're going to use our little adjustment slider, grab this point here, maybe a highlight. I'm going to just increase the red slightly, go into our blues. We can decrease the blues just a little bit.
Add magenta, go into the greens, same thing. Just take the greens down just a little bit. And now we've made their skin nice and saturated.
So I've gone too far intentionally to just show you what we can do. So we've added color back to the skin. We've smoothed it out and it's a much less harsh effect than beforehand. So we've added too much color. We've gone too far and that's okay because what's amazing is we have this little amount slider and we can drag that up to make that effect more intense or drag it down to make it absolutely zero.
We can kind of find the sweet spot. So we can adjust our skin just like that. And here's before and here's after. We've basically smoothed out the skin with one little fader. And the coolest part about this whole thing is this tone curve we just spent all this time creating, which took kind of a while to dial our settings in, we can make that into a preset.
So go up here to your presets, go create preset. I'm going to call this tone curve skin save. Make sure nothing is checked except for your mask.
You might want to name your mask first so it makes more sense in the future. But save that to whatever folder you want. Go create and voila. You can now do this with one click. And I've actually gone ahead and done this with my AI Engine Toolkit.
So if you look in here and scroll down, I've created all of these presets that will use AI to select the skin, select the hair. And I've made one down here, which I've spent a lot of time on called Creamy Skin. Hit that and voila, I've got the slider right here. I can dial it in.
So I'd encourage you, the tone curve is so much more capable than you thought it was, especially when it comes to making really specific adjustments like this. Like that is not something that I could do by just adjusting the highlights and the shadows of the image, right? Because by doing that, I'd be adjusting the entire image by combining a mask with the tone curve or the tone curve with the HSL or the tone curve with color grading. By mixing these tools together, we get infinitely more options and more power when it comes to our creations as editors. Also, if you want to grab these AI Engine Toolkit presets, you can grab those in the description.
I'll leave a link. And if you want to practice along with these files, grab those in the description as well. All right.
I hope this video served you. If it did, give me a thumbs up and I'll see you in the next video. In the meantime, create something awesome.
Peace. Thank you.