Curves what?!

So every photo has a curve aka; a histogram. You can actually see your curve in camera as you shoot and if you push info while looking at a photo in your camera is should pop up next to the photo. This thing may look scary and sound scary but it's not... trust me. Whenever my husband wants to pretend he knows something about cameras and photography he says histogram and ISO a lot in one sentence (he has no idea of what either are!) and then he prances around like he's just en lighted the world of how to take a photo... if he's not scared of the histogram then you shouldn't be either ;) Anywho so the histogram/curve shows you the distribution of color throughout your photo. On the far left side is blackest black and on the far right side is whitest white. So ideally and technically speaking you want to have a bell curve meaning the highest point of your curve should be somewhere in the middle with no extremes or peaks on either side. This isn't necessarily ideal because, like we talked about with the gray card, sometimes we shoot things that are black and sometimes we shoot things that are white. Within reason though a "good" curve is a bell shaped curve with no spikes or extremes. You can tell the exposure of your image via the histogram as well. If the curve is slightly to the left you're underexposing and if it's to the right you over exposing. That being said I've taken LOADS of photos with "terrible" curves especially when I was first starting out. Using Kate's photo of her friend we'll go through the steps of correcting the curve in photoshop starting with her original;

From here we'll go into photoshop and click the little half black, half white circle at the bottom of the layers palette and select curves. Then I grab the line somewhere in the upper half (the upper half/right side will adjust the highlights more than shadows, the middle of the line will pull up everything the same time and the lower half will adjust the shadows more than the highlights) and pull it up until I like what I see.

Now I notice that her face has lightened more that everything else and there is a gray wash over her eyes specifically so I'm going to do another curve adjustment after flattening the first. I close my curves window, right click on the curve layer and select flatten then I do it again. Select the half white/half black circle and here is where I change it up a bit. If I want something to darken like her eyes I have to work in the shadows or the lower left half of the line. So I grab a point down there (in the middle of the lower left half) and drag it DOWN instead of up because I want to even out that peak in the middle of my shadows that I can see in the histogram.

Now she obviously looks too dark in areas but I'm just looking at her face and that gray area has been resolved so I click okay on my curves window and before I flatten the curves layer I take my eraser tool, 11th tool down in my far right hand tool bar, and I erase everything except for her face and a little bit of her bangs where the gray was effecting. After that I noticed there was still a slight gray wash so I took my burn tool, the fist looking tool three down from the eraser and if it's not there right click to find it, and with an exposure of 18% I just brushed a little over her eyes and hair. That remedied the problem. Then I warmed it just a smidge using the same technique that I showed you in the last tutorial. Okay so that's that! The curve is finished and here is the final;

Now for a little sun flare ;) When I see a sky like this where the sun has just set behind the trees sometimes I wish I could bring it back up just a little but I'm not God and he knows when the sun should go down so I go with and use photoshop to give me extra light! Okay so first we've got the above image and now I'm going to add some sunlight flare to it. I select filter from the top tool bar then render and then lens flare;

You can then drag the little crosshatch where ever you want the sun to be, I chose right in the trees behind to the side of her head, and you can select the lens flare option you'd like by choosing from the different lenses listed. I chose the 50-300mm zoom lens flare and here it is;

Gorgeous shot Kate!!!