In this section, we're really gonna get into the meat of how you can manipulate
curves and really start playing with it to get good results out of your image.
So here's an example of where we have,
back to that other image that we started with.
Here's the original, and I have two other layers that are intentionally one is too
dark, and the other is too light.
To really show you can set your black points and white points to compensate for
shots that maybe need some work.
So we have the original, this is more of less what we want it to look like.
So I'm gonna turn off the visibility on that with the visibility icon and
we're gonna start with this one that's too dark.
So I'm gonna pull up a new curves adjustment.
There we go, so here's Curves.
When we look at this histogram, back to the histogram here, and
this is why it's so important, let's read the data that this is telling us.
And looking at it, I can see that there is that really big pile of dark pixels,
all those dark nooks and crannies there throughout this image.
And then there's that pile of light pixels and that's this.
So if I'm working digitally, I may just be looking at this and go, brilliant, yes,
I have the whole scope there, that looks awesome.
If I'm not looking at the histogram, it looks just fine.
However, if I try to print this or do anything else with it.
It was an illusion based on the photons blasting from my screen
that made those lights look lighter than they perhaps actually are.
So you wanna make sure, whenever you can, that your whites are indeed,
if you have something that should be white.
That you make it white, so
that truly is graphically in the whites bar all the way on the white side.
So if we're looking at this histogram in the curves adjustment layer, and
I look at my black point, all right?
You wanna make sure that each are in the base of the hill, and
that way we're reaching the full spectrum,
the full gamut of what the tonalities can be within this image.
So here we have the black point, and
I mentioned earlier that we can set our white point.
So with this guy, this is a little lighter, right now,
the very lightest that this image is getting is a light gray,
if we are looking at this image in a gray scale.
It's only getting this light, it's not getting anywhere near pure white.
Now, if we're taking pictures of just nothing but
fog, where it is all gray, that might be just fine and and good.
However in this case, it'd be nice to get the full range,
again that full spectrum of tonality within this image.
So I'm going to set this little guy and
just drag it all the way to the base of that hill.
So that will set my new white point, and let's look at the difference.
I'll do it a couple times here, that will set it so
the very brightest part is gonna be true white, those few pixels on there.
If we start moving this too far over, see how we're getting things blown out.
That's the equivalent of clipping in the audio world,
where you're going past a threshold where there's no more data.
Again, this is a graphical representation of all the lights and
darks of our image, it is the data.
If you go past that point, you're saying white, what was a medium gray,
is now pure white.
And anything to the right of that white point is gone,
we don't have that content, it's blown out, it looks overexposed.
So go to the base of that hill but don't go beyond it.
Unless it's a sun or something that you know it's okay to be blown out
intentionally, that's when you might be able to push it a little bit.
For the most part, for a good 98% of everything else,
you wanna make sure you're not going past the base of that hill.
So there we go, make sure it's right there,
running right to the base of that mountain range but not past it.
So that is setting our white point, so
if I looked in here, this is actually gonna be pure white.
We'll go back and do this manually, with some of these tools, in just a little bit.
But let's do the same thing now for the dark points, the black points, so
that way, we can see what that looks like there.
So here's this one, but again,
if I was looking at just on the screen, it looks just fine.
But I might notice or might not that the blacks are a little bit faded,
perhaps there was a glare, there wasn't in this one, it was artificially added.
But perhaps there is a glare, something that just didn't make it pop,
it was kinda faded and you don't have anything that is a true black.
So this is where, if you do a curves adjustment, just like we did for
the white point, we can set the black point.
So creating a new curves adjustment, I can see, yep, yes indeed,
the very darkest it got was a dark gray, which is not pure black.
So if it's important for it to be black,
make sure you drag this slider to the base of that hill.
And let's compare.
That looks pretty similar, so
I'm doing the visibility of that original one off and on, and
that's spread out that spectrum pretty nicely there, you can always finesse it.
So these points right here,
to back it up a little bit more, these are called control points.
So on your curves, when you do this black point slider and the white point slider,
it's taking the two most extreme control points,
which are there by default, and moving them around.
So that's an easy way to very quickly use slider,
if you're familiar with using levels, very similar, it does a lot of the same things.
Curves takes it to the next level with finessing,
although it's in between tonalities.
So if I wanna do something more custom,
this is where I can click anywhere on this line.
And I can add my own control point and I can manipulate.
Maybe I want all those mid tones to be a little bit lighter.
And that's what we were doing in that example earlier,
where I can just click on this line.
And what this is saying, actually, let's get this original here.
All right, let me delete all these, that way we're just working with this one layer
and not looking at any other curves other than this.
So in looking at this,
we have our black point, our white point, right now it's reaching the full spectrum.
But again, perhaps it's not the right look that you want.
So let's use some control points to play with that.
So the way that this works, and
why I mentioned these gradients is, think of this as the before gradient, right?
This is the original gradient representing all the darks and
the lights in the image, so black and white.
Over on the side we see another gradient strip, so
that's representing what you can change it to.
So we have one, and if we look along this line, we'll notice that everywhere they
intersect, it is a one to one ratio, this gray is the exact same as this gray.
We'll go up to the next node here,
this medium gray is the exact same as that medium gray.
So where you can change things and why the histogram is important,
is if we create a control point, let's put one right in the middle there.
And again, this is what it currently is, what the image is as far as grays,
this bottom one.
So if I say take this mid gray and let's just bring it straight up.
So if I go halfway on this grid here, now what this is doing in a nice curve smooth
way is saying, where this line is, take a look at the new gradient that it is at.
So this medium gray has now been boosted up from here all the way up to this line.
That's why they have that line that shows when you move it around.
You can literally see what it was and what you're changing it to.
Let's do it extreme so you can really see it, all right,
I'm gonna boost this way up.
So now our image looks beautiful, we're done.
No, this is saying, anything that was medium gray now is gonna be shifted,
[SOUND] All the way up to here, nearly white.
And that's what we're seeing on this image,
anything that was remotely close to medium gray is now nearly blown.
So this is why it's powerful, less is more with curves, but it also is
really important to understand how curves and the histogram are working together.
So that's how we would move that guy around.
If we add other control points, you have to be careful
that you don't get things too, technical term here, wonky, right?
It doesn't take much to start inverting what was gray is now lighter than
the light gray, it gets interesting, so
let's intentionally play with some of these.
I'm gonna create two control points, typically I don't do more than two,
maybe three at most, usually it's just one.
When you start doing too much,
unless you must have a very specific idea of what you are doing.
You will start getting some inversion,
meaning somethings are lighter than other parts that should be darker,
you are literally inverting some of those colors, so subtlety is key.
Let's say we wanted to add more contrast,
meaning to push the highlights a little bit more and to darken the darks.
This image doesn't need it but
let's play with it just a little bit just to see how that works.
So it doesn't take much for a really big effect, if I drag this guy straight down,
let's review what this means again.
So it's saying, this dark gray which was here is now boosted all the way down,
is crushed to this, it went down a couple more stops, and
that's not much of a curve.
So okay, so now we've crushed those darks and
now let's raise those highlights a little bit.
So I have this light right here, and by the way, you don't need to do these on
the actual grid, I'm just doing it since it lines up so easily there.
So I'm gonna boost those, this is a very high contrast, terrible looking image.
But we can see of how it works into play and
we can see that anything of that dark pile really got crushed even more.
The mids are staying almost the same and
those highlights are really being pushed right up into the red level there.
So this is how you can create more contrast intentionally,
sometimes an image is washed out, this is a really great way you can add that.
And another thing, since it is a layer, you can always mask this out,
or let's say it's too much of that effect.
You can always come in here with the opacity of that layer in the layers panel
and slide that around.
Let's do nothing, so now we're not seeing any of it, and
I can slide in just that amount of contrast maybe right there.
17% just makes it a little more punchy.
I don't know if I would actually do that but it's a way that you can overdo
the effect and still pull it back to fine tune it to get just that right amount.
So working with layers is awesome.
Just to show you, you can do the destructive version of this over here, and
I never even use this, but it's Image and Curves.
Actually, that's not true, I will use this if it's perhaps on an image or
I just need to make a quick adjustment and I'm not doing composite.
You can just do Cmd+M, or Ctrl+M if you're on a PC,
and that's a quick way to pull up a destructive version of Curves.
And we'll just take a look at that, all right?
So same thing, pulls it up in a new dialog box and
where you can permanently destroy your image with a couple clicks.
No, whenever you can work non-destructively, always a good idea.
Another way to add control points, which is really fun,
is we're gonna look at this different image here in added curves.
And this is where we can do it more manually working directly
on the image itself, just sweet.
So I'm gonna look at over here on the left of our panel,
our properties panel for the curves adjustment.
We have some different features that are quite nifty.
So I'm gonna go to this click and drag image to modify the curves.
This guy right here,
this little pointer with some arrows meaning you can go up and down.
And what that allows me to do is two really neat things.
One, we'll see the cursor turn into this eye dropper.
And another thing that's part of that is you'll see over on the curves how it
jumps around.
So this is how you can actually analyze, and this is why it's important to know
the histogram, you can analyze different parts of your image and
where those pixels fall on this gradient spectrum.
So, if I want to come over to something dark, yep, it's over in that dark pile,
if I want something light, It's over in the light panel.
And so again, the two features is 1, I can click right here and
it added a control point.
So that's another way you can add control points while looking at the curves and
working within the image itself.
For me, I like to look at the histogram, and I'm so used to histograms,
I can move those manually.
But especially if you're first getting familiar with it,
you don't quite know where something falls in that spectrum, right?
It's sort of confusing in a graph, you can use this tool, again,
it's that's little hand with the up and down arrows to either side of that finger.
So let's say I want that highlight to modify that, I can click there and
it adds another control point.
So if I wanted to boost that and let's say,
keep the mid tones, that medium gray the same, I can do this.
I can brighten up those darks and I can darken down those lights if I want to
without getting too crazy with it, so that's a way you can manually do it.
The other way you can manually do it looking at that image is by literally
clicking and dragging.
So yes, single-clicking will add those control points, I like to do that way,
I can finesse where things are.
And by the way, cool little tip, you can move and
really finesse it with the keyboard.
So if I'm hitting the up arrow, it moves this control point around
like you're on a little early 8 bit computer game.
You're making it go down so you can really finesse it, so yes,
clicking will add a control point.
But now if I come over here with that same feature with that arrow, and
instead if I click and drag, that's away straight from this image.
Perfect, there's that inversion that we were talking about,
where dark parts are now lighter than what used to be the light parts.
This is where I can click and drag, so
not only it makes a control point because I clicked.
But if I drag, it's literally as if my cursor is over on that
histogram in the Curves panel and dragging up, right?
So you can manually do it straight from that image.
This is really great especially if you're doing things like portraiture and
you need skin tone and something just to be a little bit lighter.
Click on that one part, drag it up, and it's a really hands-on approach
to adjusting the values in each part within your image.
We can do the same thing for those highlights.
By the way, if you start getting too many control points
you can always get rid of them.
And here's a couple of quick ways to do that.
One, you can select and hit delete, that's always easy, so
you know it's selected because it's filled, it's not hollow.
Another way is if you command-click it, or control-click if you're on a PC,
you can click those little guys and they'll also disappear.
So I'm looking at this, let me put on right in the middle here, and
I'm gonna add it manually since I know that's the mid-grade.
And let's say I want to make that waterfall pure white, I don't know why,
we're just gonna do it because we can.
So I'm gonna click and drag this all the way up, right there.
If you start going too far, it thinks that you're making a mistake and
it will say, no, human try it again.
So I just clicked all the way up and sure enough,
that light gray is now completely blown out white, perfect, success.
[LAUGH] Same thing with something dark, if I click here and
drag down it's gonna crush it up to a point.
Again if you go past that threshold, [SOUND] That's where it's going to say,
you know what, you should try that again,
human I don't think you know what you're doing.
So with this, I go right up to that point, there we go, so now we have a high
contrast, terrible-looking image, but I think you can see the application, right?
If you really need to finesse certain parts and
not overdo the contrast like I did here.
This really allows you a tactile way to go into the image and add your own control
points and manipulate it just by going up and down, so that's a really neat feature.
And we'll take that to the next level when we start
really playing with colors in this next section.