Enjoy the peerless power of Curves
Take control using one of Photoshop’s most versatile Adjustment Layers
In photo editing, there are three main ways of doing things: the wrong way, the long way and the right way. And when it comes to controlling brightness, contrast and colour control, Curves are definitely the right way. Curves work well for controlling brightness, contrast, colour corrections and colour effects because you can control which tonal areas are affected by placing and moving control points along a curve. At first, it can look like a rather intimidating control, but it doesn’t take long to build familiarity and grow in confidence using this versatile Adjustment Layer.
In this tutorial, we won’t be stacking different effects using multiple Curves Adjustment Layers, but this is something that you can do; it provides a huge amount of creative potential compared with the more limited Tone Curve in Lightroom, further cementing the usefulness of Photoshop for photographers.
1 Add contrast
Click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel, and select Curves. Click three quarters of the way up the curve and drag slightly up and to the left, then click a quarter of the way up the curve and drag slightly down and to the right; these actions create a subtle S-curve that boosts contrast. Dragging the top-right corner point to the left and the bottom-left corner point to the right also boosts contrast.
2 Create a vintage haze
Create a Curves Adjustment Layer and click a quarter, halfway and finally three quarters of the way up the curve to hold it in place. Click on the bottom-left corner black point and drag it up the left side of the box until the Output box says 50. You can place this point anywhere between 10 and 50 to control the strength of the effect; placing an additional point about an eighth of the way up the curve and using a lower Output for the black point will also work.
3 Control brightness
Controlling brightness is the most basic use of Curves, but gives you the best result by far. This is simply because when placing a point in the centre of the curve and dragging up and left to lighten, or down and right to darken, the effect is applied mostly to the midtones. You can place additional points for extra control. Here, the image was lightened by dragging up and left, and a second point placed three quarters of the way up the curve to pull it back to the original position.
4 Apply a crossprocessed look
Create a Curves Adjustment Layer; when the dialog opens, click on the dropdown menu that’s set to RGB by default and select Red. Create an S-curve (see tip 1 above). Select the Green channel and do the same. Finally, select the Blue channel and create a backwards S-curve. Use Opacity to control the strength of the effect. These channels can also be used for colour correction by dragging the curve in the opposite direction of the colour cast to be removed.