Tone curves can be a rather intimidating tool for many photographers, and as such, many users avoid using them, opting instead for the editing sliders in Lightroom. However, curves are a tremendously powerful, precise, and versatile tool for performing a ton of editing tasks, and it is well worth learning them. This helpful video tutorial will show you everything you need to know to take full advantage of curves in Lightroom.
Coming to you from Michael Rung Photography, this awesome video tutorial will show you the ins and outs of using curves in Lightroom. While they seem a bit tough to tackle, the fundamental concept is fairly straightforward: along the horizontal axis are the current luminance values and along the vertical axis are the adjusted values. So, moving a value upward will brighten the pixels with that luminance value, and moving it down will darken them. This allows you to very quickly and precisely adjust exposure, shadows, highlights, contrast, and much more. It isn't just about adjusting lighting, though; by jumping into the individual color channel curves, you can also quickly color grade your images. Curves are arguably the most powerful and versatile tool, so be sure to give them a try. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Rung.
It’s frustrating when an otherwise excellent tutorial assumes that all features are the same across lr and lr classic. In this tutorial, Mr Rung states up front that total point adjustments are the same in either. This leads people who aren’t familiar with the new feature to spend lots of time looking for certain buttons, tabs, resets, etc. That gets frustrating.
I kinda just assume everyone uses LR Classic when I teach, but also literally anyone who has used both knows they are drastically different... and therefore I find this comment to be unfair. If anything you should direct your hate at Adobe for making the two platforms so drastically different.
Bad assumption Matt. There are many LR users out here. Shame on you if you fall into the category of those who misuse “LR” to describe LR Classic. Yes Adobe make a ridiculous naming choice but it is what it is. For those trying to educate us uneducated folks, just use the correct name.
The author in question prefaces his tutorial with the following:
“It’s important to understand this is going to work the same regardless of which Lightroom you’re using, classic, lr, mobile…”
That is misleading.
Period.