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 the Curve has depths 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 underutilise it.
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 the tool has great depth and the 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’, because I felt that most who did use it, probably weren’t getting the most out of it.
Then recently, on a workshop, I discovered that Adobe had finally implemented Curves into Lightroom. It is part of the Masking feature set. This has, in my view, moved Lightroom into another level. I had never enjoyed using Lightroom because it lacked localised Curve adjustments. That is now no longer the case.
I’m passionate about Curves. I think everyone should know it, use it and Make sure they understand it. Everyone should be adopting it for all of their tonal adjustment needs. 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 achieve absolute, disciplined control of their edits. This will also be much easier than the conventional route of iterating around the exposure, blacks, shadows, highlights, whites and contrast controls hoping to get ‘close enough’ to the desired tonal response.