One of the biggest changes I’ve encountered so far in CS3 involves the Curves tool. Curves, which allows you to control pixel-by-pixel brightness levels by editing an interactive brightness look-up table, been fully redesigned and updated.
Remember the old Curves dialog? It looked like this. Many things have not changed. You still have the eyedroppers, the pencil/path options, the Auto levels and so forth. Also, Curves is still accessible by pressing Command-M or selecting the Image->Adjustments submenu.
The new Curves dialog is larger, cleaner (at least in my opinion) and has a few lovely new features as standard elements. I love seeing the pixel-brightness histogram built right into the display as a default feature. It’s also nice to be able to simultaneously edit each of the channels and the standard input/output number display is also appreciated.
I’m not sure whether the Presets are a new feature or not, but I’m really enjoying using them. They offer a nice place to start Curves-wise for certain classes of images.
Running CS3 Ext. on an iMac w/OS X 10.4.1 I am unable to bring up Curves with:
Images>Adjustments>etc. There is no "Curves" entry on the dropdown menu The keyboard command Control M does work however. Where is Curves on the dropdown?
GIMP has a similar feature (histogram) in version 2.2. Is a very useful feature, to place a curve in the correct place.
Yes, I think the new Curves Dialalog box rocks. I find myself using the Lighter and darker presets often. I love the sliders are in front of the histogram making it so much easier to adjust shadows and highlights.