- [Instructor] The tone curve is a powerful panel
for editing the tones or colors in an image.
It's a bit more advanced than the basic panel
and somewhat confusing at first glance,
so we'll go through it
so that you can better understand how it works.
But first I'm starting here in the Library module.
I wanted to show you
that I've selected the chapter_7_07_91 folder,
and we won't be able to see that
once we switch to the Develop module.
We will be using all of the images in these folders
for the remainder of this chapter.
All right, I'll switch to the Develop module with the D key,
and then we'll find the tone curve down here
under the basic panel.
If you use Photoshop,
you may be familiar with the curves adjustments
and the tone curve in Lightroom Classic is very similar,
but it's just laid out a little bit different,
especially in this default view.
As we hover over the curve here,
we get these different regions that highlight,
and these regions are represented
by these sliders down here.
The lighter tones are represented on the right,
and the darker tones are represented on the left.
So we could just take the darks
and slide it to the right here,
and that moves the curve up to go along with that,
or you can click on the curve and pull it up or down.
So up is going to make your image lighter
and down is going to make it darker.
I'm going to reset this
because I want to show you how to switch this
to the point curve, which I like better,
and it's more similar to Photoshop.
So I clicked on this white gray bubble here,
and that switched the curve to a point curve.
Now we can click on the curve to add a point
and drag that point up to brighten the image
or drag that down to darken the image.
There's also some presets here under Custom.
If I click on it, I'll choose Medium Contrast,
and that added some points to the curve,
and it brightened the lighter tone areas
by moving the curve up,
and it darkened the darker toned areas
by moving the curve down,
which doesn't work so well on this image
because it already had a lot of contrast,
and this is just increasing that contrast.
So I'm going to reset this again
and show you this target adjustment tool.
I'll click on it and my cursor becomes that tool.
And now, as I hover over the image,
the corresponding tones that I'm hovering over
show by a dot on the curve.
So these are the lighter tone areas of the image,
and if I come down here to the darker area of the cactus,
we'll see that dot moves down to the lower left corner
to the corresponding darker tones.
And then if I click in this area and drag up to brighten it,
it'll add a point on the curve and move it up.
Now it's bending the entire curve
because this is the only point on the curve,
but I can come back up to this end where the sky is
and click to add a point and pull this back down
so that I get the detail back in the sky.
You can use this to color correct or color tone an image
by editing the individual channels,
and that's what we have here:
the red, the green and the blue channel.
So I'll click on the red bubble
to switch to just the red channel.
With the red channel, when you go up,
you're going to make the image look more red,
and when you go down, you'll go to the opposite color,
which is a cyan color,
but it looks a little cyan-y green here.
You can bend this curve too to create some special effects.
Like we can take the lighter tones, the highlight tones up,
so the sky becomes pink and then the darker tones went down,
so the shadows become that blue-green-looking color.
You could do that with any of these channels.
If you accidentally put a wrong point,
say we add a point here,
and we don't like how that effect worked,
you can do a right-click and delete the control point.
You could do a right-click on the curve
and reset it at any time, too.
So you could reset all of the channels
or you could reset the channel.
So that's a right-click
or a control-click if you're on a Mac.
Spend some time experimenting with these yourself
and see what type of creative effects you can come up with.
I don't think the tone curve is necessary
for the majority of your image editing,
but there are occasions when the tone curve
allows you the ability to fine-tune a tonal area
that you can't get to with the basic panel sliders.
It's also fun to experiment
with adjusting individual color channels
to create toning effects.