Was wondering what curves are

Hi there,

I was looking through a gallery and it showed 2 versions of a shot one with a small amount of pp, the other after the curves had been tweaked. Was wondering what that meant and if I had to shhot raw to use them (still have not been game to shoot raw)

Regards Darren

Ah the wonderful world of curves.
A simple S curve can work wonders but here's a quick tutorial.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com …ials/command_pr​imer.shtml

And yes it can be used with JPEG images, with the usual image quality loss associated with the lossy JPEG files.

Curves is just improving the lighting situation on your shots you could have a very dark image - this is a good way for lightening them up without it looking too grey and badly edited.

Del

One way I have been taught to look at curves is that the levels tool is used to adjust the lightest and dakest points in an image, then use curves to adjust the midtones with more precision.

Whatever you can do with Levels, you can do with Curves so there really isn't a need to use Levels first and then fine tune midtone with Curves. Since you're going to be using Curves anyway, you might as well do your black and white point adjustment with Curves, too, and forego the Levels adjustment.

Hi there,

thanks all, I have been using auto levels, and the links is a great somple one however I have been through every drop down box/menu in elements 4 and i cant find it anywhere, sugestions?

Regards Darren

I don't believe Elements 4 has Curves. There was a way found to get Curves in Elements 3 (which relied, I believe, on the support for Actions that is in Elements 3), but my understanding is that the same work-round doesn't work on Elements 4.

If you have Photoshop CS2, you have the ability to apply an overall curve in Adobe Camera Raw. Increasingly I'm applying my own custom curves in Camera Raw. Whilst Elements 4 uses the same Adobe Camera Raw 3 as Photoshop CS2, not all the options are available in Elements.

I can think of at least one plug-in that I think would add Curves to Elements (Curvemeister), but I'd argue that the cost would be better put towards an upgrade to a full version of Photoshop.

David

I got this on the net that might help.

http://www.earthboundl​ight.com …shop-elements-curves.html

That's the site I was thinking of, Suzie. If you read it, the author says that he can't get things such as Curves working on Elements 4.

David

hi there
will this work do you think, i mean is this what curves does ? http://free.pages.at/e​asyfilter/curves.html
regards Darren

If you're on Windows, I'd download that and give it a go - it looks not too dissimilar to Photoshop's own Curves command. The big difference is that you can't use a plug-in like that on an adjustment layer, but I'm not sure Elements supports adjustment layers anyway.

David

G'day David,

got it and it works a real treat....I love it

Regards Darren