Correcting with Curves
As a rule, the Auto and Levels commands work best when you want
to increase the contrast of an image, not decrease it. Granted, you
can darken or brighten midtones. But what if you want to tone down
a group of highlights or shine a bit of light into the shadows? To
perform these kinds of adjustments, you need more control than
the basic three divisions—shadows, midtones, and highlights—
can provide. You need to divide shadows and highlights into their
component parts. In other words, you need to establish your own
brightness divisions.
This is precisely what the Curves command does. You can set and
edit a dozen or more brightness points. Or you can set just three
or four and modify them with a precision that Levels can’t match.
And now that Curves includes slider controls, clipping previews,
and even a histogram and a targeted adjustment tool, it’s more
powerful than ever.
- Open an image. Open High-contrast elephant.jpg, in-
cluded in the Lesson 06 folder inside Lesson Files-PsCS5
1on1. This is a relatively low-resolution image I cap-
tured years ago at the Denver Zoo. As you can see in Figure 6-31,
the elephant is decidedly too warm, but more importantly, the
entire image suffers from too much contrast. And as I’ve men-
tioned, reducing contrast is the Curves command’s specialty.
Figure 6-31.Correcting with Curves 205