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Curves

Curves are one of the most fundamental image adjustment tools in photo editing software, but they're not often well understood – and particularly the relationship between levels and curves adjustments.

The easiest way to think of it is that levels adjustments are used to maximise the tonal range or total contrast in the photo, from dense black to brilliant white, whereas curves are used to adjust the contrast within a specific range of tones.

An example might help. You might have a photo with maximum contrast that still looks rather flat. Typically you can make these pictures look better by increasing the contrast in the midtones, and you can do that by steepening the middle of the curve. This inevitably flattens out the highlight and shadow areas, though, so you get less contrast here than you had before. Often, this doesn't matter, but it does highlight a key point about curves –  that there's only a finite amount of contrast in the picture and that you use curves adjustments to control where in the range of tones that contrast is strongest.

Nik Collection presets: Even on a Cloudy Day (Color Efex Pro)

June 20, 2020 by Rod Lawton

Color Efex Pro Recipe

You can learn a lot from experimenting with manual adjustments and individual filters in a program like Color Efex Pro, but you can learn even more by dismantling a preset to see how its individual parts work together.

Filed Under: Featured, Nik Collection, Tutorials Tagged With: Color Efex Pro, Cross Processing, Curves, Levels, Nik Collection, Old Photo (Color Efex Pro), Presets, Recipes (Color Efex Pro), Sunlight filter (Color Efex Pro)

How to get started with Silver Efex Pro

June 10, 2020 by Life after Photoshop

Silver Efex Pro is one of the best-known plug ins in the Nik Collection and widely regarded as the premier tools for fans of black and white photography. There are lots of really good ways to create black and white images in all sorts of software, but even now Silver Efex Pro has a magic […]

Filed Under: Featured, Nik Collection, Tutorials Tagged With: Black and white, Black and white filters, Borders and frames, Burn Edges (Silver Efex Pro), Contrast filter, Control Point, Curves, Dodging and burning, Film simulation, Grain, Histogram, Levels, Loupe, Nik Collection, Presets, Silver Efex Pro, Split toning, Toning, Vignette

Lightroom tone curves explained: Tone Curve vs Point Curve vs Target Curve adjustments

May 17, 2020 by Life after Photoshop

Lightroom curves

Curves adjustments are one of the key tools in photo editing, and Lightroom offers three ways of making curves adjustments. What’s more, the curves tools look different in Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC. Complicated? Not once it’s explained…

Filed Under: Featured, Lightroom, Tutorials Tagged With: Channel, Curves, Darks, Highlights, Lightroom, Lights, Luma curve, Parametric curves, Point curve, S-shaped curve, Shadows, Targeted adjustment, Tone curve

Dawlish Beach in black and white, with Exposure X5 adjustment layers

May 16, 2020 by Life after Photoshop

Exposure X5

This project turns a regular color RAW file into a strong black and white image in Exposure X5. It uses a number of different tools so it’s a good chance to see how these work and how they can be used together. It’s also a good example the kind of image which works well in […]

Filed Under: Exposure X, Featured, Tutorials Tagged With: Adjustment layer, Black and white, Borders and frames, Curves, Exposure X, LUTs, Overlays, Radial mask, Split toning

Moody mono with a Leica M10 Monochrom and Capture One

March 29, 2020 by Rod Lawton

I met my donkey friend while I was out testing a Leica M10 Monochrom and 28mm f/2 Summicron lens. For those who don’t know, this is a rangefinder camera with manual focusing, so getting my friend’s eye sharp was a special challenge as he was getting restless because I didn’t have any carrots. The Leica […]

Filed Under: Capture One, Featured, Tutorials Tagged With: Black and white, Capture One, Curves, Dodging and burning, Linear gradient, Radial gradient, Vignette

Levels vs curves vs luma curves: ways to adjust contrast in photos

July 26, 2019 by Life after Photoshop

Levels and curves can both be used to adjust the contrast in photos, but how are they different, which should you use and is one better than the other?

Filed Under: Capture One, Editing A-Z, Featured, General, Tutorials Tagged With: Curves, Histogram, Levels

Restore faded art using levels and curves

August 15, 2017 by Rod Lawton

Levels and curves

With careful use of levels and curves adjustments you can rescue even the faintest and most faded artworks and restore both saturation and contrast. Levels and curves are two of the most basic adjustment tools in any image-editing program, but there’s often confusion about which to use and when, and it often appears as if […]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Curves, Levels, Lightroom

10 tips for curves adjustments

November 22, 2016 by Rod Lawton

Almost any image-editor worthy of the name offers curves adjustments, but they can be tricky things to get right. It’s easy to overcook the results or fix a problem in one area only to cause a problem in another. So here are ten top curves tips to show how they work, what they can and cannot […]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Contrast, Curves, Solarisation

How to make better Aperture curves adjustments

September 30, 2013 by Rod Lawton

Aperture curves adjustments

Curves adjustments are one of the more advanced image-editing techniques, not because they’re especially technical or difficult to carry out, but because you have to understand exactly what’s happening in order to make any genuine improvements. With curves, a small adjustment can make a big difference, and Aperture curves adjustments are no different. Curves work […]

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Filed Under: Tutorials Tagged With: Apple Aperture, Curves

How to adjust curves with the Perfect Effects Tone Enhancer

September 27, 2013 by Rod Lawton

Perfect Effects Tone Enhancer

OnOne Software Perfect Effects isn’t just for image effects – you can also carry out everyday image-editing adjustments, thanks to the Perfect Effects Tone Enhancer. This is used for some of the effects in the presets panel on the left of the window, but if you want to access it directly it’s best to go […]

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Filed Under: Tutorials Tagged With: Curves, ON1 Perfect Suite

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