This Weeks Tips: We Like the Curved Look

Congratulations! You've taken a magnificent photo or you've just purchased the perfect one for your project. The end is not so near, though because as a design professional you want to put your custom stamp of creativity on the image.

Many beginner designers open the Curves tool, slide the point left or right, close the box and often undo the change. Once you master the subtleties of the Curves tool, it will be your most powerful tool for controlling tonality and color regardless of whether your image is too light or too dark.

Here are some Curves tips the iStock design team picked up from the Kelby Training PhotoShop CS3 conference today in Calgary. Think of Curves as a blind on a window. When the blind is all the way down, there's no light or total blackness, when it's all the way up you have maximum light or white.

1. If there's an area of the image you would like to darken to bring out the detail of a shot, open Image>Adjustments>Curves. Then click and hold the eye-dropper tool to see the area you want to lighten, noted by the hollow circle moving on the graph.
   
   
2. As you are using the eye-dropper control and click (PC) or command and click (Mac) and this will create a first point (Point A) on your Curves graph. From here you want to drag that point down (not left or right) to darken it. You may notice that this darkens the rest of your image, but don't worry.
   
   
3. To correct this extra darkness, create a new point (Point B) by clicking in the Curves graph just under Point A. Point B is your fixing point and you should move that point ever so slightly, keeping it beneath Point A, until the tonal range is to your liking.
   
   

Banish your fear of Curves forever!