Using curves in Color mode is so powerful! Ok, this is really the juice of the tutorial. This will remove the brightening effect from the mids and highlights, effectively just brightening the shadow areas. Drag up to brighten, down to darken.ĭrag up in the shadow area to open up the brightness of the image.ĭrag down on the tones where the grass is. In curves the darks are to the left, the highlights to the right. (you could also have chosen Duplicate and Invert Mask from the previous mask for the same result.) Let’s create a new mask for everything but the sky.Ĭlick on the 3 dot menu and choose Invert, this will swap the mask.

(you need to add 2 points to get an effective curve) Lets see how they work. If you click the picker, you can drag up or down on your image to brighten and darken specific tones. If you want more control over any of the regions, use the curves. You can also observe these regions on the histogram and actually adjust them by dragging on the histogram. The 5 sliders in Lightroom and Camera Raw cover 5 regions: Black, Shadows, Exposure (Midtones), Highlights and Whites. Make adjustments with exposure and Highlights to recover details in the sky.

Let’s start with this photo I shot in Kauai, Hawaii.Ĭhoose the Develop module and create a mask I also have a course on Camera Raw, Lightroom and another one for Curves Curves in Masks in Lightroom I do have a more detailed tutorial here for Photoshop though.

In fact it applies to all curves in Lightroom and Photoshop. It doesn’t matter if you use Lightroom or Camera RAW, this tutorial will apply. I saw was, because that feature has now been added. There is something more important than you realize missing from Lightroom, that was the ability to use curves on the masks. A more recent edition to Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW are the AI masks.

Photoshop lightroom online