Photo instructor Maike Born insists that “The magical Tone Curve is Lightroom’s most powerful tool for unlocking the full potential of your edits.” We bet that if you’re not already taking advantage of this transformative technique, you definitely will be after watching the five minute tutorial below.

Born is a successful 29-year-old photographer based in Dusseldorf, Germany, who’s been passionate about our craft since she bought her first camera at the ripe age of 15. She’s also a very adept educator whose YouTube channel documents her photo journeys and ever-evolving skills.

She describes today’s quick episode like this: “I’ll guide you through everything you need to know—from understanding how the Tone Curve works to using Lightroom’s RGB color channels and the Picker tool for precise, cinematic results.”  Bottom line: whether you’re just starting out or want to take edits to the next level, this is the lesson that will finally make you add the Tone Curve to your Lightroom bag of tricks.

According to Born, the straightforward Tone Curve tool is super important because “it gives you full control over the light and contrast in an image and can completely change your edit.” She starts with the basics, illustrating that the Tone Curve is an easy-to-decipher graph. “On the horizonal axis from left to right you’re moving through the brightness range of an image, i.e. from shadows and midtones to highlights.”

The vertical axis, on the other hand, “illustrates how bright or dark those parts of the photo will become with the bottom being dark and the top being bright.” The key element in practical terms is a straight diagonal line the runs from the bottom left to the top right of the graph before any tonal adjustments are made.

This bright line represents your original photo as is appears and Born demonstrates how to manipulate this guideline to achieve the exact effect you’re after. Thus, if you pull down the line in the manner she suggests, the dark areas get event darker. Conversely, pulling the line upwards makes the highlights even brighter, “and this is a really easy way to enhance contrast.”

You’ll also learn why an “S-Curve” is a great place to start, depending upon specific characteristic of the image at hand. Hence, “you’ve just increased contrast in a very controlled, precise, and clean way without using Lightroom’s Contrast slider which often affects the entire image.”

Born delves into the foregoing with further details, and she provides a few other important aspects of this approach. She also explains why Lightroom’s Picker tool factors into the equation, and how the Tone Curve enables you to modify the mood of a photo with both natural and stylistic effects.

There are many more how-to videos on her instructional YouTube channel for photographers of all skill levels. And don’t miss the tutorial we featured with another post-processing expert who demonstrates five “game-changing” editing tricks that all Photoshop users should understand.

One common reason for unimpressive photos is a lack of attention-grabbing contrast with weak highlights and shadows, along with an insufficient difference between these two crucial elements. Today’s Lightroom tutorial from the popular PHLOG Photography YouTube channel explains how to deal with high-contrast images and achieve a wide range of tones from bright whites to deep blacks, and everything in between.

Instructor Christian Mohrle is a highly acclaimed German landscape photographer and one of our favorite post-processing experts. This 12-minute episode will help give your images more punch so that you’re not temped to punch a wall in frustration when photos are boring and flat. The trick is understanding the benefits of mid-tone contrast.

Mohrle  presents his workflow in the context of landscape photography, but everything you’ll learn will work wonders for all sorts of disappointing outdoor images. His sample shot was captured in a forest against the light, and we suggest downloading the Raw file with the link beneath the video so you can follow along and make the adjustments yourself as they’re explained.

The magic occurs at the at the 8:33-minute mark of the video, so if you’re just concerned with mid-tone contrast techniques you can jump straight there. But Mohrle kicks off the edit with some important basic adjustments, masking, and color grading to make his original shot as good as possible before proceeding. Thus, we suggest watching from beginning to end.

Mohrle begins by merging a sequence of multiple photos by selecting all five shots in the film strip, right-clicking, and choosing Photo Merge and then HDR from the dropdown menus that appear. The final result appears in the filmstrip, and Mohrle uses this merged file to apply his initial adjustments which start off by changing the Profile from Adobe Color to Adobe Landscape for reasons he explains.

Next Mohrle walks you through several quick global adjustments to the image as a whole, before turning to local enhancements that target specific areas in the frame with different tools. Then you’ll see how he improves the photo further with thoughtful color grading—just where’s it’s needed to balance out the tones.

With all the preliminaries out of the way, it’s finally time for the meat of the tutorial, namely, understanding the concept of midtone contrast and following Mohrle’s straightforward advice for putting this method to work. The PHLOG Photography YouTube channel is a great source of how-to viseoa, especially for landscape photographers, so be sure and take a look.

We also recommend watching the tutorial we featured with a 35-year pro who discusses three “huge” exposure mistakes and how to fix them fast to achieve photographs with perfectly balanced light every time.