Levels and curves
How to make more effective selective tonal adjustments by tweaking points on a curve
In high-contrast scenes, your camera may prioritise its settings to reveal shadow detail, causing highlights to be overexposed. If the camera prioritises to capture a bright sky, then your subject’s shadows can be lost in silhouette. The Photos app has sliders that enable you to claw back shadow or highlight detail, but these may not be powerful enough. Fortunately, you can summon the Curves panel to target and tweak specific tones and reveal missing details. We’ll also look how the Levels panel provides an additional way to make selective tonal adjustments. We’ve provided a camera raw file to work with, as this format contains more information about hidden shadows and highlight details than a compressed JPEG does.