Having a point curve for controlling contrast is something that many of us take for granted when in PS, but in LR, it’s not that obvious how to go about getting one.

A simple solution is to click the button highlighted with a red circle in the image below. This allows you to do some really funky things with images in lightroom in a similar way to how you’d do it in photoshop.

One of those, and this was inspired by seeing someone asking a how-to question, is to be able to process a set of negative scans directly from within lightroom. The question which inspired me to have a play (and I can’t remember where I saw it asked) was “How do I process a large folder full of scans from my Dad’s old negatives within lightroom?” The answers I saw gave various workarounds using ACR and updating the LR catalogue with the XMP sidecar file. They were all a little clunky unfortunately and I thought there had to be a better way.

Enter, stage right, the point curve available in LR3. Once you change the tone curve into a point curve, it’s just a case of dragging the points around to give you a line from top left to bottom right instead of the usual way around.

This is demonstrated in image Plain Negative (below) and works just as well with colour images as it does with the B&W I’ve used as my example for this.

Further playing with the point curve started to give me solarisation effects, so I made a bunch of presets showing what they do.

The original image is included (small so it is quick to load) along with an example of what the various presets do. They only affect the curve, so anything else you might want to do to an image or have already done won’t be affected; unless it’s to do with the tone/point curve, of course.

Hope you find these useful, and I accept that they’re of limited use, but I thought the negative one was the most useful for users of lightroom.

Please enjoy and create something of your own to share with the world.