Use Curves to Add Contrast?

Go under the Image menu, under Adjustments, and choose Curves (or use the keyboard shortcut Command-M [PC: Ctrl-M]). While you can use Curves to set your overall highlights, midtones, and shadows (like we did with Levels on the previous page), today we mostly use it to add contrast (when you want more contrast than the Contrast slider in Camera Raw will give you). When the Curves dialog opens, you’ll see a graph in the center and a diagonal line—we adjust that line to create contrast. At the top of the dialog, you’ll see a pop-up menu of presets that add (or take away) contrast. Just for now, choose Medium Contrast (as seen above), and you’ll see that diagonal line take the form of a subtle S-shape (we call it an S-curve). The steeper that S-curve gets, the more contrasty your image will look. Now choose Strong Contrast and look at the S-curve—it’s much steeper and your image looks much more contrasty. You can edit the curve manually by clicking-and-dragging on the adjustment points that now appear on the curve, or you can add your own points by clicking once anywhere along the curve. To remove a point, click on it and drag it quickly off the curve. Again, as I said on the previous page, for photographers, this is kind of an “old school” way to adjust your image—the more modern workflow is to use Camera Raw, either before you open the image, or as a filter after it’s already open in Photoshop (again, see Chapter 3).