First Look: Inside Photoshop CS3
Posted 03/25/2007 at 1:43pm
| by David Biedny
More to Love About Curves (continued)
Another Levels capability that has found its way into Curves is a direct way to set the shadow and highlight breakpoints - the absolute darkest and lightest values in the image - by clicking the respective sliders at the bottom of the Curves controls. Also new to Curves is the ability to overlay the individual color channel curves together on the same readout (displayed in their respective channel colors), which is useful when you're doing precision color correction.

The shadow and highlight controls (and Command-Option) highlight the locations of clipped areas in the image.
As in Levels, you can also see exactly where these shadow and highlight regions fall on the image by pressing the Command and Option keys while clicking either of these controls. This is exactly what you need to determine where you're likely to run into problems when sending a photo to a printer or creating color separations for professional print reproduction.
Next: More to Love About Curves (continued)