How To Use The Tone Curve In Lightroom Classic

Have you ever avoided the tone curve panel in Adobe Lightroom Classic because it seemed too complicated? After watching this video, and a little bit of practice, you’ll have the confidence to use the tone curve and make your images a lot better. I’m gonna show you how to use the tone curve in Adobe Lightroom Classic.

Adding Lightroom Tone Curve Points

The tone curve is located in the development module. And it’s just below the basic tab. In fact, when you come into the development module, you’re probably gonna have the basic tab open so you’ll wanna close that, and click on the tone curve to open that. So the solid line is your tone curve but behind there, there’s a dotted line called the tone curve line. And when you move your tone curve above that dotted line, it is making your image lighter. And when you move your tone curve below that dotted line, it is making your image darker. To reset this tone curve you either double click on this point or come down here to the reset and click that. So in easy terms, the left side of this tone curve is the darker parts of image. And the, up here, in the top right is the lighter parts of the image. And down here on the lower left hand side, the darker parts of the image, if I move my tone curve along the x-axis, it gets darker. And if I åmove it along the y-axis, you’ll see it gets lighter. It’s kind of like creating a faded look. And on the other side and the lighter parts of the image, or the light parts of the tone curve, if I pull this down, I’m getting darker. My lights are getting darker. And if I pull this over on the x-axis, my lights are getting lighter. So using the RGB channel, I can make points along here. I’ll make a point there, make a point here, make a point there, and behind here you’ll see that there is as histogram, much like the histogram up here. And so there’s a lot of information in the shadows here or the darker parts of the image. And I can grab this point and I can bring up my shadows and there’s a lot of information in the highlights. If I wanna bring down my highlights, I can grab this and pull it down a little bit. And again, if I want to get rid of these points, I just double click on them. One of the things you’ll probably do with this RGB channel the most is create contrast in the image. So I would make a point there, there, and there, and just make a little S-curve. And you have some contrast in your image. What you could do is come up here and you can turn off the adjustments and turn them back on to see how it looks. You have this little switch up here where you can do the before and the after.

Tone Curve Presets

A cool feature that’s here in the tone curve panel is this dropdown right here. It says point curve. What these are, these are presets. So if I select medium contrast, you can see all these points that it created on the tone curve here. And there’s another value called strong contrast. So that’s another preset. What you can do with this is if you’re editing several photos from the same shoot and you have some points on this curve that you created and you wanna save for basically every image after this one, you could do that.

So another cool feature is when you click on this little icon down here that looks like a curve, it reveals some sliders. So when you hover over your tone curve, so if I’m starting from the top, it kinda tells me where on the tone curve all these values are. All the way, highlights at the top. There’s my lights. There’s my darks. And there’s my shadows. So the thing about this tone curve is, and when it’s in this mode, you won’t be able to click and create points. If I’m under my tone curve and it says highlighted shadows, I can bring this up. I’m bringing up the shadows. And darks, if I’m over the darks, I can change those. I can make them darker. If I’m over the lights, I can adjust those. Make them lighter, darker. And if I’m on the highlights, I can bring those down a little bit and it’s made all these adjustments. So that’s kind of cool to do with the sliders because it tells you what area you’re in on your tone curve. And of course, you don’t have to highlight any of the tone curve. I can move the slider around to see how it affects the image. I go to either one and make my adjustments that way too.

How to Use the Targeted Adjustment Tool in Lightroom

So I have the curve but it doesn’t have points. So what if you’re not sure where to make adjustments? On this photo, if you look at the histogram or the tone curve and you’re just not sure where to make those adjustments. Well, there’s something in lightroom in the tone curve. It’s called targeted adjustment. And it’s right here. So I can use the targeted adjustment tool anywhere in this image. So if I’m on this lighter part of this background and I wanna darken it, I just drag down a little bit. And you can see over here on the sliders, the highlights move down. And if I want to come over here to this darker part of the image in the background, I can drag that down and my dark slider over here is showing and the curve is changing. And if I want to, say, increase some shadows like right here in her hair, I click and drag up. And my shadow slider is moving. And you can go through the whole image like this and choose areas where you know that the targeted adjustment tool will help you. So little bit of highlights here on her shoulder, I’m bringing that down. The highlights are changing, so it’s making points on this curve and take note that, where you use the targeted adjustment tool should be where you see the sliders. In other words, if I click on this point curve right here icon, it will put you back in the mode where you can add points. And if I click on it again, you see the sliders. So make sure you’re in the mode where you see the sliders and that’s gonna give you the best results. So that’s if you’re not sure of how to start making adjustments by looking at the histogram or what points to make on the tone curve. You can come over here with the targeted adjustment and just click and drag up or down depending on what you wanna lighten or darken.

Using the Red Green and Blue Color Channels

So we’ve been using the RGB channel to make image have more contrast. So if I wanna add contrast here, I’ll make a point there, a point here, one here, and I’m just gonna bring up some highlights. Drags down some of the darks. Just making a simple S-curve to add some contrast. But now we can use the channels, red, green and blue. So when you select a specific color channel, you isolate that color and a secondary color. For example, when you select the red channel, you’re working with red and cyan. And when you select the green channel, it allows you to work with green and magenta. And the blue channel allows you to work with blue and yellow. So let’s make some points here with the channels. I’m gonna select the red channel. And I’m just going to make some points here. I’m gonna make a slight S-curve. Put the red channel. And I’m gonna do the same for the green channel. Put my point there, so it’s a little bit easier. And I’m gonna do the same thing for the blue channel. So I’m gonna make just arbitrary S-curves. And so what that kinda did was, in a sense it’s kinda like color grading. So that’s a use that you can use for your red, green and blue channels here in the tone curve. You can, after using the tone curve, you can use the basic panel, split toning, anything else in Lightroom and go back and forth. And use this tone curve panel with any other adjustment in Lightroom. And so with this here’s the, here’s before. Here’s the after.