Photoshop Curves Tutorial - Part 2

Photoshop Curves Tutorial - Part 2

Yanik’s back for Yanik’s photo school in part two of this curves tutorial. Now we have this image again and we have adjusted the S curve. Now let me just remove those points here for now by dragging the mouth of no dialogue window of the graphics. And you can see there is a place here called channel. It’s a dropdown menu if you click on the arrow you have your three channels, red, green, blue, RGB.

If I clicked on the red, the graphic changes color becomes red indicate that you are in the red channel and basically here you can play with the tonal colors. Anything that you drag into the upper triangle will add some red. So if I want to put some red into my highlights I would do this. So if I want to put some red into my shadows, I would do this on this side here.

Now the opposite of red is cyan. Now if I bring this back to neutral and I drag down you can see the image is getting this tortoise type of color which is basically cyan. And I go all the way down you can see that the image becomes really, really green.

Now this for the purpose of this image let me just put a nice neutral midtone redness through out the whole image here. Now we can do the same thing for the green channel if we go in the upper corner. Reputing some green in and the opposite is magenta. So if we’re going down here, we’re adding some magenta and I really like this. It’s becoming a really nice sunset here. And again your next one would be blue in the upper triangle, you’re adding blue and in the lower triangle you’re adding yellow.

So we don’t really want yellow for this image I think a little bit of blue could be nice not too much because it look fake so it maybe just a little tiny pattern blue here. If we look at before and after photo you can see the dramatic effect it has. It still looks natural and it has those nice cyan, magenta, and blue tones to it. All done through the curves dialogue box, before and after.

So instead of using hue saturation or the color adjustment tool, you can do it all with incurves. If you forget what the opposites are blue and green and red. What you can do is go in to your image adjustments and your going to color balance and you’ll see on the slider here the opposite of red, cyan, green, magenta, blue, yellow and you could do the same adjustments here a little bit of magenta, a little bit of blue it’s another way of doing it there's a all rose lead to Rome right. And here many ways you can do the same thing in Photoshop before and after.

And that’s how you use curves within the specific channels and I hope you enjoy this two part tutorial on the curves adjustment tool and stay tune this week for brand new tutorial. bye, bye.


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