Set the tone

Adjust Levels & Curves in Capture NX-D to create dramatic colours and tones

Levels & Curves panel Access this powerful colour-editing panel in the Edit section at the right of the workspace. Here we’ve undocked the Levels & Curves and the LCH panels and used Window>Edit to hide docked editing panels for a cleaner workspace. RGB This drop-down menu defaults to viewing and editing points on all three RGB Curves at once, changing tone rather than colour. Adjusting points on each individual colour channel can produce creative colour changes (see the walkthrough below, and our accompanying video). Colour channels Here the highlights in the red channel have been pushed up and its shadows darkened, creating a classic S-curve. The blue Curve’s highlights feature a more severe dip, which helps add a cyan hue to lighter patches of sky. Gamma You can adjust a range of colours in a channel by placing an anchor point on a Curve and dragging it up or down (see point 7). Alternatively, select a Curve anchor point and drag the Gamma slider right to make the point dip, or left to raise it up. These adjustments to the initially diagonal Curve change the way that the RGB colours mix together, producing creative changes in colour. Rese t channels Tinkering with Curves can dramatically shift colours and tones. Click here if you need to reset the RGB channels. LCH Panel The Lightness, Chroma and Hue panel enables you to use Curves to change a range of image properties. We’ve set the drop-down to adjust Color Lightness. Add anchor point By clicking on this icon you can then sample a specific colour by clicking an eyedropper on the image. Here we clicked on the sky to add an anchor point to the blue section of the Color Lightness Curve. We then dragged the anchor point downwards to darken the sampled colour. Width Once you’ve sampled a specific colour, increase the spread of the adjustment to include similar colours by increasing the Width value here. Doing this enabled us to darken a range of blues in the sky. Reg ister adjus tment Once you’ve adjusted a shot’s colour Curves to produce a distinctive look, click on this drop-down menu, then Register Adjustments. Type in a label to help you identify your filter and click Rename. Click OK. You can now access and apply your custom filter to other photos from the Levels & Curves panel’s drop-down menu.