Hualien harbor, Taiwan
Continuing with our look at the Develop module in Lightroom, underneath the Basic panel lives the Tone Curve panel. The tone curve shows the changes made to the tonal scale of the image, with the horizontal scale (black to the left) representing the input and the vertical scale (black to the bottom) the output. Simply put, if you move a point up it gets lighter, down it becomes darker.
Tone Curve
The default tone curve is a mostly straight line from dark in the lower left to bright in the upper right. The curve can be adjusted in a few different ways. Below the curve are four sliders – Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows – that can be moved as desired. Mouse over the graph itself and you can see which areas each influences. You can also drag the curve on the graph to make your adjustments.
Next to the top left of the curve graph, is the Targeted Adjustment tool button. Activate this by clicking on it and you can make your curve adjustments directly on the image itself, by either clicking and dragging up/down or using the arrow keys on your keyboard (hold ALT for smaller increments, SHIFT for larger). Simply place the target adjustment tool over the area of the image that you want to alter, and adjust as necessary.
Along the bottom axis of the graph are three triangular shaped sliders. These are the Tone Range Split Points and let you restrict or expand the range of tones that are affected by the sliders. These are useful for fine-tuning your curve.
Finally, there is also a Point Curve menu underneath the graph. This defaults to medium contrast, with linear and strong contrast being the other options. These make a good starting point but targeted adjustments are so much more powerful.
The beta for Lightroom 3 offers many more options for curve adjustments. I will look at these in a future post after the final release is available.
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