Lightroom Curves, Ultimate Tonal Adjustment

I’ve just completed the writing of my Lightroom Curves’ ebook. I still have to work on the video examples that will accompany it, and I don’t have much free time right now, so I am now anticipating a late summer release.

I thought I should perhaps give a little bit of background for why I’ve created this e-book:

I’ve been a Photoshop editor for over twenty years. Once I had found the Curve tool and masks, I saw no reason to look for anything else and over the decades of using Photoshops Curves and masks, my resolution has remained unchanged. For me, Curves should be in every decent photo editor, and it should be implemented in a way that you can create masks and localised control. Photoshop gave me this from the onset and so, I have never found any reason to move away from it, and indeed feel that everyone who edits photos should adopt an editor that has a good implementation of Curves.

Additionally, I have found that Curves has a depth to it that I did not even know were there when I first started using it. Any beginner can start to use Curves straight away. But most, in my view, never truly learn it and thus tend to not fully realise the possibilities it has to offer.

Curves is easy to use, and therein lies a problem: most assume that the obvious tonal adjustments are the extent of what can be done with it. But more I have used it, the more I have realised that it can be highly nuanced, allowing for a precision of tonal control I cannot get from any other means. But this can only happen, if one truly understands what the tool is doing.

So around 2016 I wrote an e-book about ‘Advanced Curves’, to demonstrate the power of the tool and to encourage the occasional or light Curves user to delve in further.

Then recently, on a workshop, I discovered that Adobe had finally implemented Curves in Lightroom’s Mask tool. This has, in my view, moved Lightroom to another level. I had never enjoyed using Lightroom because it lacked localised Curve adjustments. That has now changed.

I’m passionate about Curves. I think everyone should know it, use it and adopt it for all of their tonal adjustment needs. But they need to understand it. And so that is why I have now translated my ‘Photoshop Advanced Curves’ ebook to the Lightroom platform.

This e-book is therefore my encouragement for regular Lightroom users to adopt Curves as their ‘one stop shop’ for tonal editing.

By learning and adopting Curves, Lightroom users will be able to execute precision control of their tonal edits.

Rather than iterating around the conventional route of exposure, blacks, shadows, highlights, whites and contrast controls hoping to get ‘close enough’ to the desired tonal response, Curves gives you a single control that allows you to pinpoint exactly where you need to change tones and to bring about the exact feel that you are looking for.

Lightroom Curves

Just a short note tonight to say that I’m almost finished converting my ‘Advanced Curves’ e-Book which was originally written for Photoshop users, to a format ready for Lightroom users.

Here are some of the curve adjustments from within the book. I am wondering how many of these curves are familiar if you are a Curves user?

Curves is like a musical instrument. The first few years with it, I learned how to play a few chords with it. A couple of melodies. Had a few stock Curves I would utilise again and again. My repertoire would slowly expand over the years as I learned to ‘see’ tonal issues in my work. Two decades later and I feel it has become an instrument I would not wish to be without, but at the same time, now realise that I will never finish exploring what it can do. It’s just so powerful, and when I want it to be, it can also be extremely nuanced.

I don’t use any other tonal adjustment tool. It’s always Curves. And yet I realise for many, it can be so easy to underutilise it.

Which is why I felt strongly about writing my Advanced Curves e-book for Photoshop to begin with, and also why I wanted to write an edition for Lightroom users.

I’m pleased to say that I have finished translating the e-book and have a version that is ready for Lightroom users. I just need a few more weeks (workshops / tours permitting) to tie up the loose ends now. I am mostly there.

Moya Brennan

I heard today of Moya Brennan’s passing. The album ‘Macalla’ by Clannad is one of my personal favourites, and is one of those albums that has kept me company through my life since I first heard it in 1985 at the age of 18. I had no idea back then, that it would become a regular companion to my life.

Rarely for me, do I get my artistic inspiration from actual photography. It is as though my photography comes through my love of the outdoors and the other things in life that affect me. Instead, I get so much artistic input and inspiration from reading, stories, films, experiences and of course music.

Music, has the ability to make me feel things that no other artistic medium can. Songs become highly personal and I am sure many of us can relate finding that certain songs will take us back to times in our lives. Whether we want them to or not.

I’m sorry to hear about Moya’s passing today. Such a beautiful voice and gifted cláirsearch player. Thank you for the beautiful music.

Intermission

I’m sorry I’ve been quiet of late. Truth is, I’d hoped to take off some time for a long while now, and this year I’m taking a bit more time out of my photography life, to have a break.

I haven’t been posting much on the blog, and mostly that is because I’m recharging by doing other things that are non photography related.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a keynote presentation today that I gave to the Royal Photographic Society back in February 2025 and thought I would share.

I think my work got very graphic and minimal around 2023. I would say I’ve relaxed off this approach a bit at the moment. Not through any conscious decision. I always just follow wherever my art takes me. But I am still very proud of this work and when you review it with the work made in 2015 and then during my first visit in 2009, you can see that I was on a path to simplifying what I do.

I cannot really explain or describe it. I’ve never been that interested in photography as some kind of ‘record of reality’. It is what we wish to make of it, and I am more interested in the interpretive side of things.

Often our previous work shows signs of where we’re going. I think these signs are much easier to see when we are looking back at the audit trail.

I will be in South America for all of May. Back home in June. Maybe I might post something whilst on my travels. We will see. Until then, if you are ever feeling tired, or saturated with your photography, sometimes the best thing to do is take a break and go and do something else. You might just be needing to step away for a while, before reconvening with new enthusiasm.

The future of photo editing

I’m not sure there is one.

Some of the more well known graphics software companies are having their share prices affected so badly now. It will be interesting to see if companies like Adobe will still be here in five years time. Let alone my worry that Photoshop will be changed beyond recognition as more and more AI features are implemented to compete with AI engines out there that can already produce great images from a few keyboard commands.

As far as I can tell, if anyone is looking for a specific image for their advert / brand / company - they are generating them on one of the many AI engines now.

I am sure that many landscape photographers are steering this way as well. If anyone hasn’t won a photo competition from generating an image by AI, then it won’t be long. It’s going to become pervasive.

If there’s less of a demand for software by Adobe or other companies, then they will have to adapt and change very quickly. This is why their share price is affected at the moment. How to manage that change, and to what, is the big question. No one knows where the whole AI thing is going, and I think all we can guarantee is that it will change in ways that we hadn’t considered. I don’t think Tim Berners-Lee ever thought that the creation of the world wide web would have, as a side effect ‘reality distortion bubbles’ for instance. No one could have predicted it. So we have no way of knowing how the whole AI thing is going to morph and change, or how it is going to affect society, behavioural patterns and life in general.

As much as we may welcome Generative Fill, these AI features are really just the tip of the iceberg for me. I have always believed that humans take the path of least resistance, and relying more on software than actually spending time and effort learning something is often the easiest approach for many. Convenience always wins.

I’ve always enjoyed learning. I’ve always enjoyed putting the effort into whatever it is I get interested in. I have seldom looked for a quick fix because I learned many years ago that they don’t really exist. There are no shortcuts in life.

It is one of the reasons why I do not use Luminosity mask software. I prefer to build masks manually as I am of the very opinionated view that building masks manually allows me to learn more about the image I’m editing. For each time I finish editing an image, I feel as though I have been educated as to how the image hangs together. I have learned how the tones work throughout the image.

Because by working through an image manually, we gain experience in learning to “read” images. This is a skill that few talk about, but this is exactly what a traditional darkroom printer gains experience in: “reading the image”, so they know “what” to do to them. When we use automated tools we don’t gain experience. We don’t learn to “read the image”. Instead, we have delegated our decisions to automation, and are essentially editing blind. This is a dangerous area to be in, because we are at risk of fixing areas of the image that weren’t broken, because we’ve not learned to “read the image”.

I hope the future allows me to do manual editing of my images.

I hope I am given the option. And if not, that it is just a period we go through.

Predictions are off the table. As a friend has said to me several times “humans can never predict the future, all we are good at is creating the present”. We simply cannot predict where it is all going. But I do think that the path of least resistance is the one most folks will take. Convenience always wins.

The Creative Act

This is by far the best book I’ve read on creativity. Written by Rick Rubin, a famous music producer, this book comes from someone who understands what it is to be creative.

All of us are creative, but few of us realise it. In this book Rubin offers insights into how to tune in, how to recognise ideas and how to work on them. Always, I enjoyed his writing because it all comes from a place of understanding that everything is fluid, nothing is ever complete, that there are always ideas being presented to us, and it all mostly stems from working on one’s own awareness and trusting and sensing one’s own intuition.

I particularly enjoyed his sections on ‘how to move on from work you’ve completed’, and more so his thoughts about art related competitions. I was relieved, but not surprised to find that Rubin is more focussed on the truth that we create art for ourselves, and often it is the creating of it, rather than the final results that matter the most.

Never judgemental of others acts, he prefers to focus on how one can tap into their own creativity citing for instance that Picasso preferred to paint when he had music, the tv and the radio on at the same time. EMINEM is another artist that can only write lyrics when he has a tv on in the background for company. I know also, that when printing in his analog darkroom, Michael Kenna prefers to listen to audiobooks. Knowing this about these artists surprised me because I prefer silence, but everyone has to find the environment that works for them.

This book is pretty much how I see creativity. I have always preferred to focus more on the internal / philosophical side of creativity, rather than the ‘how to’. This is what Rick Rubin does best in this book.

Creativity is always more a case of finding one’s way through the work. It is also about learning to trust one’s own hunches, and to change one’s mind if something better presents itself.

For me, reading this book was more a confirmation and I often found myself saying to myself ‘that’s right’ when he states something that I have always deeply known, or innately understood to be true.

A copy of this book should be on every creative’s bookshelf.

Maybe

Last year I was gearing up to publish a new book this year. It is all written, designed, and the foreword was written by Guy Tal, a photographer whom I greatly respect.

I’m sorry to let you all know that I have shelved plans to self publish any books for the foreseeable future. My reasons being that I have found over the years of self publishing, that the process is fraught with many challenges.

For the past six months or so, I have really gone off the idea of self publishing and I don’t think my feelings on the matter will change any time soon.

Self publication has been enormously stressful for me and I think the stress is now outweighing any personal artistic or monetary benefits that I could gain from going through the process again.

The only way forward for me now, would be to find someone who wishes to publish my books.

You can never go back

Yesterday I visited a dear uncle of mine, whom now has vascular dementia. I found I connected with him about my travels. I remembered that he spent many summers traveling around Europe with his wife and girls, so I mentioned several places to see which ones would spark a reaction in him. Switzerland seemed to be the place and when I mentioned the Matterhorn in particular, my ucle became even more present.

So tonight I dug out my few images of the Matterhorn that I made back in 2012. I thought I might print one for him as a present.

Looking at this image tonight, I am struck by the realisation that I really would struggle to pull off an image like this one now: I’m not the same person any more.

There is this belief I think, that progress is a one way street (improvement only). But that it simply not the case. Each time we gain some advancement in our photographic skills, the innocence of our beginner self is diminished.

When one gains, one also loses something about themselves. We are changed.

What we may assume as immaturity of our style at the time of creation may, many years later, be seen as something beautiful that we no longer possess. I am acutely aware there are things about my earlier work that I think are beautiful now, that maybe I did not accept or acknowledge at the time. Time has passed, and so to, have my abilities to create what I once did.

I think this is similar to looking at old photographs of ourselves. We are reminded of who we were, our immaturities, and also, of the innocence attached to our younger selves. The life of an artist is similar: we all have an artistic childhood, an artistic adolescence, and also an artistic adulthood.

As in life, so too in photography.

This perhaps touches upon the realisation that change is the only thing that is guaranteed. Everything we know is transient. This includes our creative abilities. They fluctuate, are fluid and are constantly changing. What we create now, is more a record of who we were at that time. A marker of where we were artistically.

One should always embrace their past, accept who they were, and also realise that no matter how much they’ve learned along the way, we are, and always will be children in our creative hearts.

Digital Grading

The whole reason I like to shoot film, is because it isn’t verbatim. For instance, Fuji Velvia film has a massive blue colour cast in the shadows. Kodak Portra is overly warm / reddish in hue. Each film has its own palette which adds its own character to the scene.

Just recently I bought a very old digital camera - a Leica M240 - (which I am loving by the way) to experiment with. It has lovely colours and I think it almost (note “almost”) has a film like quality to it. I have been wondering of late, if it is possible to impart a filmic look to the images, and I think the straight up answer is no. If one wants to have a film like look: shoot film.

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I realise that this is an ancient argument, and these days, most folks don’t care. Except for a very small number of folks.

I’ve been playing with introducing a colour cast to the images above (top row, as shot with minimal RAW editing), bottom row - myself playing with trying to impart a sense of filmic look to the work.

What I have noticed, is that most films have contrasty blacks. There is often a bluish cast to some films, or even a greenish cast. Kodak’s Portra has a reddish cast to it.

I don’t think I will be substituting my film cameras for digital ones any time soon. But I must admit that I have been enjoying playing around with digital. I am around a decade too late, but I have never been keen to jump into something new when I am working with something that works quite well already.

However, it’s nice to be able to shoot scenes in low ISO that I couldn’t before, and I’m enjoying working with a rangefinder system again. I have always loved rangefinders - my first ‘proper’ camera being one: the Mamiya 7II. Which I used exclusively for the first decade of my medium format photography.

The thing is: film and digital just look different. With a little bit of nudging and massaging, you can get your digital files to look sort of like film, but not the same. Applying a curve preset does not work, as I have often found film seems to react to different light in different ways. But as I said: this is no longer an issue for most. If it were, digital camera manufacturers would be trying to make their sensors more filmic and they’re not.

But, I am enjoying working with a 12 year old digital camera. Perhaps this is becoming a thing also? Is there such a thing as ‘retro-looking-digital-capture’?

It’s fun to play with different mediums. I am currently thinking of taking a digital system along with me on my trips, so I can capture ‘behind the scenes’ shots. I think that would be a nice thing to offer - some additional insight to what it was like to be there, in addition to my finished film images.

Assynt Workshop '26

Just heading home from my workshop up in Assynt. Been coming here since 2000. So that is now twenty six years.

We had a mixture of weather this week, but overall, we got some very nice shots. Here are the images that I chose to edit from all of the participants.

What I like to do on the ‘Scottish’ trips, is take a digital projector with me. We have a private room in the hotel and we do a ‘review+edit’ for two hours each morning after the sunrise shoot and breakfast.

It’s hard for me to explain what the ‘review+edit’ is like. I am always encouraging, but I do point out where I think the composition does not work, how it could have been improved (often by moving) and then choose to use the participant’s images to show editing techniques. Rather than assuming my aim is to ‘make the image better’, I like to emphasise that it’s more about conveying concepts. My edits are often not precise enough at the time - I am after all, editing live in front of a group. I have always found that I need to live with my edits for a few days to help my eye adjust. As the week goes on, I then start to show the group how I would assemble a portfolio, and often use one image as a ‘reference’ to help me notice discrepancies in others.

Always the aim is to educate. Never to ‘perfect the images’. So I am not there to micro manage images, and we can sometimes get lost in someone’s feeling that something is ‘not quite right’. With a group of six people, it’s not a good idea to edit by committee. So I often make a point at the beginning of the week that the aim is to show concepts, and not to spend time fine tuning them.

Thanks to everyone who came. We had a great time. I love coming to Assynt and Ullapool.

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