Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Color Curves: Enhancing Tone and Contrast

If you hang around photo-editing veterans, you'll hear plenty of talk about how useful the Curves tool is. Contrary to what you might expect, Curves isn't a drawing tool. Instead, it works much like Levels (Understanding the Histogram), but with many more points of correction. Adobe calls the Elements version of this tool Color Curves to remind you what it's for. Unlike Levels, which lets you set your entire photo's white point, black point, and gamma settings, Curves lets you target specific tonal regions. For instance, with Curves, you can make only your shadows lighter or only your highlights darker. Maybe that's why some pros say, "Curves is Levels on steroids." (For advice on when to use Levels and when to use Color Curves, see the box on Adjusting Levels: The Slider Controls.)

Elements' Color Curves tool is a stripped-down version of its counterpart in the full version of Photoshop, which is just called Curves. With the more powerful Curves tool, you can work on each color channel separately, as you do in the Levels dialog box. You can also drag any point on the Curves graph (like the one you see Figure 9-12) to manipulate it directly. For example, you can drag to adjust just the middle range of your greens. Elements doesn't give you that kind of flexibility.

Since Curves, in its original-strength version, is a pretty complicated tool, Adobe makes it easier to use in Elements. To start with, you get a group of preset adjustments to choose ...