Software How To

Well, the above quote from image-editing expert Ryan Breitkreutz is about as emphatic as it gets. The reason for his enthusiasm is this: Adobe's recent Lightroom update included enhancements to the already powerful Tone Curve tools—with changes Ryan says are "insane."

While we're not sure Adobe would agree with his specific characterization, it's clear that Lightroom's Tone Curve capabilities are now more robust than ever. In the 15-minute tutorial below, you'll learn how to take advantage of everything the new Tone Curve tools can do.

Ryan says that the power of AI in combination with Tone Curves tools presents new editing techniques for making faster and far better edits in a variety of ways. In other words, "you can now do some things that just were not possible before—and it's probably going to blow your mind." So hold on to you head and let's go.

In basic terms, the Tone Curve is a visual tool enabling you to quickly select certain points of brightness in an image and adjust them up or down. For example, you can grab points on the graph to easily darken a bright sky or open up shadows to reveal details that weren't readily apparent.

Ryan explains that there have always been several limitations when using these techniques, which become obvious as you look at his examples. Solving these shortcomings is what's so special about how Adobe has improved the tools. So forget everything you knew about using Lightroom Tone Curves, and watch Ryan demonstrate "the new way."

The first "game-changer" you'll see is that it's possible to change to the brightness (or color tones) of a bland sky without affecting the rest of the image. So if you pump up blue tones in the sky, the warmer colors in the foreground remain untouched. Conversely, you can modify foreground tones without biasing the sky.

You'll also learn how to quickly and selectively adjust the look of a person in the frame in a way that doesn't affect his or her surroundings. Ryan demonstrates how Lightroom's new Brush adjustment sliders are used to get the job done.

This is just a taste of what the new Tone Curve tools enable you to accomplish, and Ryan fills in the blanks by walking you through a bunch of straightforward techniques. It actually is quite amazing and we hope that your mind is still intact when the video concludes.

There's a good reason that Ryan's YouTube channel has almost 150,000 subscribers, and we encourage you to pay a visit and find out for yourself. And if landscape photography is your thing, don't miss our earlier tutorial with simple masking techniques that will really make your images stand out.