Tone Curve

Tone Curve is probably one of the most feared tabs in Lightroom. However, I hope that after reading this section, you will be more confident in using its capabilities to your advantage.

Figure 6.51 – Tone Curve's default settings

Tone Curve represents the tonality of photographs. When you look more closely, you will notice it's a squeezed version of the Histogram tool, representing tones from left to right – dark to light.

If the line is straight and at 45 degrees, then no changes have been made to the tonality of our photographs. If the line isn't straight after you've just imported the photograph, this means that Lightroom applied default changes while importing it; this might be directed by the camera profile, for example.

Parametric Curve

There are four tonal regions that we can adjust in Parametric Curve mode – Highlights, Lights, Darks, and Shadows. Once we move our cursor over the curve line...