THIS IS HOW I ROLL.

I've been wanting to write a curves tutorial for a while. And, thanks to kaneha, I now have motivation to do so. XD Anyway, to kaneha, there's talk of curves, but they contribute to how I achieve my coloring, so I hope that helps ^^

WARNING: There's one picture at the end that's close to 2MB (it's a .gif), so please be patient while it loads! ♥ The rest are fairly manageable sizes.

Samples included in this tutorial:
>>o1. → →
>>o2. →

>>oo. This is the curves window. Behold!



Doesn't seem to make much sense at the first glance, huh? (Well, that's what I thought, at least. XD)

You can bring up the curves window either by pressing CTRL + M (this will apply curves only to the layer that you have selected), or by clicking the divided circle on the bottom of your layers palette and bringing up a new curves layer (recommended so that you can edit the curves later if necessary).

>>o1. This is the most basic breakdown of curves. Whether or not this is the "official" breakdown of the window is... up to you to figure out. XD It may be wrong from how it's actually coded to work, but this is how I use the windows and how I think of them in my mind.

Fig. 1a	Fig. 1b

Fig. 1a This cap outlines what happens when you move the center line to the regions shaded in the window. The further to the bottom right you move the line, the darker the midtones get; the further to the upper right you move the line, the lighter the midtones get.

Fig. 1b This cap outlines what happens when you place a point in the middle of the curve line. (More on that will be explained later.) Just remember that the bottom left are the shadows, and the upper right are the highlights. You can further subdivide these with more points.

>>o2. If you look at the top of the curves window, you'll notice that there's a dropdown menu by the word "Channels". Clicking on it will bring up the individual color channels that make up the picture: red, green, and blue. This is how I break down those windows:

Fig. 2a	Fig. 2b	Fig. 2c

Remember, Fig. 1b applies to these windows, as well.

>>o3. Okay... Enough of that. Let's actually apply this to pictures, yeah? :D However, keep in mind the following things when you work with curves:

• Sharpen your image AFTER you've applied curves. Curves tend to sharpen your picture.
• Apply brightness/contrast AFTER you've applied curves, if you still feel that it's necessary.
• If you're using curves on a new adjustment layer, merge it with your base before you resize, otherwise things might end up looking a bit too sharp for your tastes.

>>o4. Open up your base image. I'll be using a scan of the DVD cover for Avatar: The Last Airbender; scan provided by AvatarSpirit.



>>o5. Crop and resize your base.



(Ignore the dotted border; I do that last, and I add transparency to my dotted borders, and I forgot to save an unedited copy of the base. ^^;)

>>o6. Open a new curves adjustment layer. I thought the base was too dark, so I moved the RGB curve up a bit to make the entire image a wee bit brighter.

	→
Fig. 3a	Fig. 3b

>>o7. The picture was a bit too green, I thought. Since red is the opposite of green, I went to the red channel to make the picture a bit more red and a bit warmer.

	→
Fig. 4a	Fig. 4b

Notice how there are three, not one, points on this curve. Why? Well, these are the "midpoints" I was talking about earlier.

Anyway, first, I adjusted the midtones by dragging up the curve to make the entire picture more red. This sets the "midpoint" around which the other adjustments revolve. I wanted the highlights to stand out more, so I dragged the top right section up to the red side. Adding more red to the shadows would only make the entire picture too red, so notice that I dragged it down slightly to the green side. Opposite/complementary colors increase the contrast between each other, so the shadows are much starker if you set the shadows to green instead of to red.

Remember, you can make further adjustments to the different sections, if you want.

>>o8. Well, now, although the shadows are much richer, there's still a slightly fuzzy feeling in the foreground. The greens in the shadows seem to be taking away from the base and dulling it down a bit too much, so we're going to adjust that and add a bit more red to them via the green channel.

	→
Fig. 5a	Fig. 5b

The shadows are now much deeper and the highlights much clearer.

>>o9. You can stop here if you'd like, but I tend to fiddle with all three color channels. So, here's what I did with the blue channel:

	→
Fig. 6a	Fig. 6b

I find that the brightest whites are generally obtained by adding blue. Plus, blue and orange are opposites. So, by adjusting the blue channel, I strengthened the highlights and added even more contrast, because I am contrast crazy.

>>1o. So, after all the curves, this is our final result, from beginning to finish:

→

Fig. 7

I doubt that you need further brightness/contrast layers. :B Anyway, as per kaneha's request, I'm going to digress a bit and list my further adjustments to get the finished icon.

>>1o.a Add the following texture on a new layer above everything else:

by silverqe screen, 100%	→
Fig. 7a	Fig. 7b

>>1o.b Repeat with this one above the previous one:

by violetterosa screen, 100%	→
Fig. 8a	Fig. 8b

>>1o.c Using the first tutorial from this tutorial by grrliz_icons, pick a pencil brush, set it to 1px and spacing to 200%, then draw a dotted border around the icon. (Or you could use your dotted border brush. :B) I used #EF6A47, which I picked off the icon, and placed the border layer under the curves and textures, because I like them to be incorporated into the icon.

normal, 100%	→
Fig. 9a	Fig. 9b

If the textures are clashing too much with the border (removing chunks of it and the like), select the layer (either via a marquee or via CTRL + click on border layer), take an eraser, set it to a low opacity (25%-50%), and gradually remove parts of the texture. until you feel satisfied with it.

>>1o.d Select a two-pixel margin around the icon, then remove the dotted border from the selection (CTRL + ALT + click on border layer). Then, either fill this with white on a new layer, or merge all visible layers and delete this selection, making it transparent.

>>11. Here is a highly condensed version of this tutorial with another sample icon. The image is 2MB; sorry that it's so big! >w<;;



And... That's it! :D Remember to experiment! Play around with the points and see what they do; hell, that's how I learned to use curves XD;;

Also, if you could take a moment to rate this tutorial, that'd be great ♥

Poll #999263
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

How would you rate this tutorial's helpfulness on a scale of 1-10, 1 being not helpful at all and 10 being immensely helpful?

A comment as to why the tut was good/bad would also be greatly appreciated. :D I'd love to see how my tutorials are (or aren't) helping people!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to show me what you made, ask for more explanations, request the curves breakdown for another one of my icons (I'll let you know if curves are used prominently in it), etc. ^^

♥ If you liked this tut, why not watch this journal? :D

- hl