The Amazing Power of Curves in Photoshop

In today's tutorial, we're gonna introduce one of the fundamental tools for editing your photos in Photoshop. It's called Curves. 

Curves are one of those tools that will make a huge difference in any one of your images. Curves can be used to lighten or darken any part of your image, and they can be used for color correction as well. To start, go to Layer - New Adjustment Layer and choose Curves. Curves dialog basically has the information about our image. This is called a Histogram. With your dark information being on the left and your light information on the right. if you take center point and simply click and drag up, you're gonna lighten your whole image. If you drag the center point down you're gonna darken your image. 

The great thing about these curves adjustment layers is they always come with a layer mask. So, let say that we want to brighten the specific area where our subject is. Go ahead and just drag the center point a little bit brighter. But now it affects our entire image which we don't necessarily want. If we fill the layer mask with black, which is gonna make this curves adjustment layer invisible we can, with a soft brush, white as foreground color, paint on the layer mask just the areas where we wanted to be visible. To do that, click on the layer mask and go to Edit - Fill and choose Black.   
This is a wonderful part of Curves but it doesn't really stop there. If you double-click on the curves icon thumbnail, the little drop-down window pops-up, and you can make those areas even brighter or darker by moving the curve line up or down.

                                                       
Adjusting the lights and darks is one of the basic principles of using curves. We can use curves to adjust the color. If we make another curve adjustment layer, and this time in the little drop-down window (RGB) we can find the options to change the Reds, Greens, and Blues. If we choose the red channel, click in the middle and move the center point up it's going to add more Red into the image, and if you drag the center point down it's gonna add the opposite color which is Cyan. Red and Cyan are both available it the Red Channel.

The Green Channel is gonna be Green and Magenta.

The Blue Channel is gonna be Blue and Yellow.

If we want to make this image a little bit warmer we need to go to the Blue channel, click and drag a center point down just a tiny bit. We added a yellow color to an image. Next, go to the Red channel, and drag the center point tiny bit up, and we added red color to an image. Red and yellow color intersect to make an orange color. This is one of the ways to warm up the image.

Curves are incredibly powerful and easy to use. If you're not sure where to start your photo editing, curves are a great place to start. Thanks for reading the article I hope you liked it, and we’ll read on in the next one. 😀😀