Make your photos Pop with Curves
Make your photos Pop with Curves
Oct 30, 2008
A simple technique to give your photos more life using Curves
Classroom: Photographers In Perth




In this lesson I wanted to share a simple technique for putting more "POP" in your photos. It was shown to me by a friend that takes a lot of portrait images (thanks Trev).

The editing is completed in Photoshop CS but any photo manipulation software that has a curves editor such as Fireworks, Gimp, Paint Shop Pro, Corel paint etc. will be able to produce the same effect.

You could make it an automated action or command but I find that each photo is slightly different and the adjustment needs to reflect that.

Lets get started:

First off open your basic photo.

In this case I have a photo straight off my wife's point & shoot. The only thing I have done is take out the red eye from the flash so the subject didn't look evil.

Before photo of climber straight from point and shoot camera

Open your curves editor (Ctrl/Cmd M in Photoshop) and adjust the curves into a very lazy S shape by clicking on the line at the right hand grid point and moving up then clicking on the bottom left grid point and pulling down. As you click on the line, the nodes will be automatically created...See image for clarification.

How far you move the nodes up and down depends on the lighting in your image so just experiment and watch the image till it looks right.

Curves dialogue showing nodes

The result is below. The colour change is subtle but the overall image is clearer and more natural.

After curves adjustment photo of climber straight from point and shoot camera

Another image showing the contrast next to each other. You can see the subtle line running roughly through the centre of the image.

Detail of contrast

Extra TipIf you are working in CMYK colour space for printing the movement of the nodes is reversed so move the bottom left up and top right down

Comments

Simon Taylor - Oct 30, 2008

Nice

Thanks Brad. I will definately use this technique to make my photos stand out better. Just to clarify is this process making the light parts slightly lighter and the dark parts slightly darker for RGB (screen).

Brad Hile - Oct 31, 2008

Great To Hear It Will Be Useful For You.

Curves remap the pixel brightness values higher or lower so in essence does make the bright parts brighter & dark parts darker (increasing local contrast)but its the mid range that benefits a lot via the curve though as it graduates contrast amongst the colours whereas a straight contrast adjustment is a lot harsher I think.
Hope that helps
Brad

Kev Yong - Nov 2, 2008

Cool Lesson

Nice one Brad. Congrats on the prize too.

The curves tool in photoshop is great. I like your explanation and the example really shows how a simple S curve can make an image pop.

I also use unsharpen mask for getting a bit of extra pop from my images.

Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask.
Settings:
Amount 10-20%
Radius 40-50%
Threshold 0

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Brad Hile
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