From the course: Documentary Photo Techniques with Photoshop and After Effects
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Restoring contrast with Curves
From the course: Documentary Photo Techniques with Photoshop and After Effects
Restoring contrast with Curves
- While a Levels adjustment gives you three control points, Curves allows for many more. This can be quite useful when dealing with an image that lacks contrast. Rather than just adjusting the mid-tones, the shadows and the highlights, you can be much more refined with your control. Let's open up an image, here, that has a few contrast problems. I'll immediately add a Curves adjustment. It's the third button, here, in the Adjustments panel. Now, you'll see that it's possible to make some adjustments. Let's make this a little larger. What the Curves shows you is that this is the shadow and this is the highlight and we have the Input value and the Output value. For example, if I pull this up you'll see that it starts to get remapped to brighter values. In this case, we took the Input values and raised them and that's okay but we went way too far. Clicking the Auto button will attempt to give you an auto value, which is all right, but there's a more useful way. I like to Option or Alt +…
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