As more and more people have been getting in to digital photography and finding more situations where they need or want to enhance the contrast, saturation or other aspects of their images they run in to the fact that Photoshop for example may offer many different ways to accomplish the same task (to varying degrees of success). The curves tool is one of the most useful adjustments available but you’ve got to know how to use it and a lot of people don’t, I’ve been asked by friends and by online contacts to help them with curves a number of times and so I decided it was finally time I put something together to help teach curves.
For a long time now the curves tool has been my most used adjustment for improving the appearance of photos. Most often I use it just to recover the ‘pop’ that is lost in the camera but I also use it to enhance images beyond that at times. It’s a very powerful tool and my background in film among other things has influenced how I think about and use curves, so I’ve tried to approach curves in a more simplistic way to show what they do and how you can use them.
This guide to curves contains three parts:
Curves 1: The Histogram
Curves 2: The Curve
Curves 3: Manipulating Curves
Let me know what you think! Major thanks to everyone who helped out with this 
