Understanding Tone Curves In Lightroom
What are Tone Curves? How do you use Curves in Lightroom? We will answer these questions and more, as we take a closer look at the Tone Curve in Lightroom, what it does, how to make adjustments to the Tone Curve, and how those adjustments will affect your images!
What are Tone Curves?
The Tone Curve (simply referred to as "curves" by most photographers) is a powerful tool that can affect the overall brightness and contrast of an image. By adjusting the Tone Curve, you can make your images brighter or darker, and affect the contrast levels.
Components of the Tone Curve Panel in Lightroom
In the Lightroom Develop module, you will see the Tone Curve panel on the far right. Press the triangle to make the panel drop down so that you can make adjustments:
Let's look at some of the icons in the panel...
By clicking the icon on the top left, you are enabling a feature that allows you to adjust the values of a specific tonal region, such as highlights or shadows, by placing your cursor over an area in your image that you would like to adjust:
For example, let's say I wanted to brighten my shadows. What I can do is hover my cursor/mouse arrow over a region that has dense shadows, in this case, in the subject's hair.
In the example below, I have clicked on that area, and have pulled to tone curve line upwards to increase the brightness of the shadows.
As you can see in the result in the bottom image, the image becomes slightly brighter. You will also see that the tone curve also has a slight arc to it in the second image after brightening the shadows region:
Beneath the tone curve and histogram you will see the Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows regions. By adjusting these sliders, you will also be adjusting the tone curve, and vice versa.
If you hover over each region of the tone curve, Lightroom will show you what region is being affected. For example, when I hover on the top-right of the curve, my Highlights will be affected, if I hover in the middle, my Lights will be affected, and so on:
Adjust the sliders in the various regions to observe how the shape of the Tone Curve changes:
You can also adjust the Tone Curve independently of the sliders by clicking the Edit Point Curve icon:
You then have the ability to manipulate the tone curve by clicking and dragging the line. Bringing the line up, towards the top left of the histogram, will brighten your image:
Bringing the line down, towards the bottom right, will darken your image:
There are also tone curve presets, which you can select by clicking the up/down triangles beside the words Point Curve: Linear:
Linear is the default Tone Curve setting. The other two settings will increase the contrast of your image:
In the Strong Contrast example above, notice that the point curve has a slight "S" shape to it. S-curves give your image contrast, so the larger the S, the more contrast you will have between your highlights and shadows.
Adjusting the Lightroom Tone Curve
In the Lightroom Tone Curve panel, you also have the ability to work within the Red, Green and Blue channels. In this section, we are just going to look at making adjustments to the RGB channel, which is all three channels together.
Aside from applying your own custom edits to the tone curve, you will also find in some cases that you will want to tweak the tone curve after applying presets.
In this example, I applied the Hazy Matte Lightroom preset from Pretty Presets. Take a look at the tone curve:
I wanted to brighten the image a bit more after applying the preset, so I pulled the tone curve towards the upper left just a bit to brighten the image:
Finally, if you want to see your image without the Tone Curve adjustments, you can turn them off by clicking here:
How to Color Balance Using the Lightroom Tone Curve
Now, lets look at how to use the Red, Green and Blue channels to color balance your image. Then we will look at how you can adjust the Lightroom Tone Curve after applying a preset.
Adjusting Red, Green & Blue Channels in the Lightroom Tone Curve for Color Balance
Click the icon highlighted below to edit the point curve:
Next to the word Channel, press the up/down arrows. By default, you will already be in the RGB channel, which controls all three color channels. Here, you can also select the individual color channels. First, I am selecting the Red channel:
When you click on the curve, you can pull the line in various directions in order to affect the color of each channel. If you pull the line up, towards the top left, you will be adding the color of the channel to your image. If you pull down, to the bottom right, you will be removing color.
For example, in the Red channel, if I pull the curve to the top left, I am adding red to my image. If I pull to the bottom right, I am removing red from my image and adding Cyan (since it is the opposite of Red):
The same applies to both the Blue and Green channels as well. Just remember, pulling up on the curve increases the color of the selected channel, whereas pulling down on the curve decreases the color by adding in the opposite color.
A Practical Lightroom Tone Curves Example
Below is a practical application of one of the many ways you can use the individual color channels to edit your image.
In this image, I felt as though the image, overall, was a bit too red, so I pulled the tone curve down a bit, to the bottom right. Keep in mind, a little goes a long way when using the tone curve, so in most cases you will not need to adjust the curve very much:
I then pulled up in the Green channel to enhance to tones in the grass:
Finally, I pulled down in the Blue channel. This added yellow to the image (since yellow is the opposite of blue) which compliments the golden backlighting of the image:
As you can see below, the steps I took removed the red cast from the image, cooled the skin tones, and brought more yellow to the backlighting:
Adjusting the Lightroom Tone Curve with Presets
In some cases, you may want to adjust the Tone Curve after applying a preset. For this example, I have applied Saffron (one of my favorite presets) from the Sugar and Spice Collection:
I wanted to tone down the red a bit, so I opened the Red channel in my Tone Curve panel and saw that there was a slight S-curve:
To reduce the red, I moved the points on the curve so that they all lined up on a diagonal, rather than on an S-curve:
Syncing the Tone Curve to Multiple Photos in Lightroom
You may want to apply those same tone curve adjustments to other images from the same photo shoot or batch. The easiest way to do this is by using the Lightroom "Sync" option located at the bottom of the Develop panel. We have a great tutorial on how to sync photos in Lightroom here.
Do you have any questions or comments about the using the Tone Curve in Lightroom? Just leave us a comment below - and PLEASE SHARE this post using the social sharing buttons (we really appreciate it)!
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