chromalux: Curves

Ever wonder why there are so many different kinds of tools to correct color? I have no idea, so if you want an answer to that, you'll to have to go somewhere else... But one guess is comfort. I have generally feel more comfortable with Levels and Hue/Saturation controls than with Curves - Curves feel a little unwieldy to me, but I'm starting to get the hang of it - check this out...
Here is the original image:

As you can see, this pic has some problems - the main one is that there's no real shadow or highlights - it's pretty much all gamma, everything is in the mids and the RGB parade confirms that -

But with a few tweaks, you can have this!

Pretty sweet, huh? Yeah, awesome....

But really, if you use a light hand when using Curves it's actually a pretty cool color corrector, and fast.

When you look at the Curves grid, it's set up in a very logical way - the bottom of the grid is your lift or shadow, mid section of the grid is your gamma, and the top of the grid is your highlights or gain.

One of the quick and dirty ways to pull a picture into shape is a simple "S" shape on the "master" or "RGB" Curves selector.

As you can see, this simple tweak brings the picture into pretty good shape.

And looking at the scopes we can see the ranges have spread out - the shadows sit down where they should be, and the highlights are about right.

Something's bugging me, let me step back a bit... The crest of her nose is a little too hot, so I'm going to soften the "S" on my RGB master:

Ok, that's about right... So the next question would be what type of light are you looking for? Mid summer? Cool fall? Winter? Or are you trying to match another shot? That's where the individual RGB controls come in handy...

For this picture I'm going to be working in the red and blue channels of the Curves effect and adjusting accordingly...
A little warmer...