How to master red, green and blue channel curves to tone your images

 

 

If you have done much photo editing, you are likely familiar with curves. However, RGB curves are a bit more complicated as you have control over individual red, green and blue channels. A recent video from Conner Turmon helps break down what RGB curves are and how to use them to enhance your photos. The video is centered on using RGB curves in Adobe Photoshop, although you can use the lessons in the video below with any software which has RGB curves.

While a traditional curve with all three channels controls brightness and darkness of different values in your image, when you use individual channel curves, you can add and subtract color. Turmon recommends that you think about it as though you are painting. What he means by this is that you should think about adding and subtracting color as you would if you were mixing paints on a palette. There's no purple channel, for example, so how do you add purple to your image? By adding red and blue.

(Via Reddit)