Lightroom curves are really difficult to finetune.It could be great to be able to create/select a point on the curve and move it with the arrow keys by tiny steps (Photoshop does this very well).
Do you know that holding the [Alt] key while dragging a Tone Curve Point constrains the motion to 1/10th its normal movement? It is a great way to fine tune any point.
At the moment the only way you can adjust points along a Tone Curve is by dragging with the mouse, and it's hard to make accurate adjustments, even with the graph at maximum size. It would be really useful to be able to make fine adjustments to points by toggle-selecting them and moving using the cursor keys.
Using Lightroom's Tone Curve adjustments feels clumsy and not nearly as fluid as making tone curve adjustments in Photoshop. Can you improve this in a future release?
(p.s. using LRCC on Windows 7 64bit i4770k i7, 16GB RAM, dual SSDs, GTX 970 4GB graphics card).
Six years and still waiting, in the meantime new bugs are cropping up while usability issues are ignored.... remind me, why are we paying their salaries each month again?
Click to select the Targeted Adjustment tool in the upper-left of the Tone Curve panel and then click on an area in the photo that you want to adjust. Drag or press the Up and Down Arrow keys to lighten or darken the values for all similar tones in the photo.
As Rikk pointed out you can use the Alt/Option key to help move the point in smaller increments. Unfortunately, the implementation of this feature leaves a lot to be desired. The tracking of the cursor and point is ABSOLUTELY terrible and makes it hard to use.
Why oh why can’t Lightroom have smooth adjustments in the tone curve?!? It’s like it’s been dippped in fast-drying glue. Photoshop can do it, so can ACR. What’s the problem LR? Seriously, I’d love an answer as to why, for over 11 years, this tone curve is clunky as ever. Adobe rep, please chime in.
I might help to actually list your issues with the Tone Curve instead of a generalized statement.
The tone curve in Lightroom does some useful things that I don't think ACR and Photoshop will do.
Option click near the curve and a point will be placed without moving the line. Hold Shift while moving the point and it will only move in the vertical direction. Hold Option while moving the point and it will move slowly Hold Shift-Option while moving the point and it will move slowly in only the vertical direction,
I do agree that having a feature to use the arrow keys and Shift-arrow keys (smaller movement) would be a handy feature.
I discovered today that once a point is selected, the values (0-255) of the two fields "Input" and "Output" can be selected, and the up and down arrows can be used to increment and decrement them.
Not as intuitive as using the four arrow keys on a selected point, but it suits my purpose where I want to set thresholds for the start and ends of the curve for the scan of a slide, and only want to change the input value.
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