Fall Decay Sets In — and a little soapbox about curves

So I love the curves tool. Every piece of imaging software I’ve ever used has it. Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop, Nik’s Viveza, all of them. It’s easily the most powerful tool in the digital darkroom. In fact a bunch, if not most, tools in these pieces of software are just different interfaces for the curves tool.

A couple of photographers I really admire, Michael Frye and David Nightingale both have tutorials on curves on their sites. Both also show just how different the results and style can be with the same tool. Awesome.

I only mention it because I made this image by completely zeroing out the raw file in Lightroom (that means I took out all adjustments. Blacks, Brightness, Contrast — set to 0 and the tone curve set to linear). I then set my white and black point, added an S- Curve for contrast and BOOM, 85% of my work was done. Everything that those  sliders did was accomplished with one curve. Love it! Like I said, I’m a curves nerd…