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13 tips for working with Photoshop curves in 2 minutes

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Curves are one of the most valuable and powerful tools contained within Photoshop. Many of us have been using them for years. But do we know all of the tricks when it comes to working with them? Probably not.

This short video from Julieanne Kost at Adobe shows us 13 quick tips for working with Photoshop’s Curves in just two minutes. The tips cover a range of slightly less common techniques, including working with multiple curves simultaneously and making adjustments from the image canvas itself.

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How to reverse engineer colour grades in Photoshop and reproduce them with curves

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Colour grading is such a complicated and in-depth topic. Sure, you can cheat and buy some preset pack from somewhere, but you gain so much more when you learn to understand colour and its nuances. Then you can create your own grades and get them just the way you want.

That’s the point of the Look Creation & Color Grading series from RAWexchange. The whole course is four hours of video training that covers digital colour theory and principles in both Capture One and Photoshop. It’s a paid course, but there is also this free bonus videos, which shows us how we can analyse and reverse engineer a colour grade, and then apply it to other images using curves adjustments.

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The difference between Levels and Curves in Photoshop

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You can adjust the tonality of the photos using either Levels or Curves. But how to know which to use? And what are the differences anyway? Unmesh Dinda a.k.a. PiXimperfect shares a video about the differences between these two tools. He uses an interesting analogy, comparing them with different types of calculators. So if you’re wondering what exactly makes Levels and Curves different, this video should make it easier to understand.

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Is Darkroom the ultimate mobile toning solution?

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As life is quickly becoming busier and busier for me I’ve had to find solutions to be able to work on the go and with that, naturally comes sacrifice.

I opted for a Surface Pro 4 and an iPhone 6sPlus for my “Travel kit” and with the Wi-Fi abilities of the Sony A7ii it makes for a versatile set of tools that can cover a range of operating systems / platforms and quickly allow me to output some high quality material.

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How to use curves to fix any colour problem!

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I had to shoot in an environment without HSS (Didn’t have my Citi600 with me) and I didn’t have my Hoya ND16 filter with me either. Which meant that I couldn’t effectively overpower the ambient light coming off the stage to get rid of the blue on the model’s skin.

This led me to trying a few solutions, albeit badly until Stefan Kohler hooked me up with this ridiculously simple and awesome solution for fixing colour problems while retaining all of the micro details in contrast etc (which you lose when you use Frequency Separation for low level skin etc).

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Curves Adjustments Layers 101 (With 10 Examples)

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A few days ago, we posted that little fun game about curves. You should go and try it now! Some people really struggled with this one, so I thought it might be a good idea to explain this here. you can consider this a curves crash course.

Curves. For some it’s just a big mystery, for others it’s daily routine. For those of the first category, here’s a little crash course. You can probably consider this a Curves Adjustments Layers 101. Just make sure you understand each of the workflows I explain.

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