GregRG wrote:...On page 15 she mentions: "A significant elevation appears to the left, where a window is positioned behind the scale, and to the right you’ll see a gentle peak where the light reflects off the plastic rim". I've looked at this for some time and the statement does not look correct. It speaks to my flawed understanding of color curves probably. If the elevation of the curves is to the left of the curve graph then this would have to relate to the darker part of the image however the gentle peak to the right, being on the right would have to be the bright window. If I isolate just that part of the curve which maps to the "gentle peak" and adjust the mapping line, it seems to change the brightness of the window only.
It sounds to me like you're confusing the waveform monitor and the curves panel.
On page 15 of the Color Correction guide, the waveform monitor is immediately to the right of the image that shows the window and the scale. In
that waveform, the rise on the left corresponds to the window on the left, and the small "spike" around 3/4 of the way toward the right corresponds to the highlight on the right edge of the scale face.
The curves panel is the diagram at the bottom of the page. This diagram is a combination of a histogram and a curves editor. The histogram is the "peaks" that look like an exaggerated mountain range and the curves editor is the diagonal line.
In the curves panel, the horizontal (left/right) axis does
not correspond to the left and right parts of the image the way the waveform monitor does. It shows a range of pixel brightneses from dark at the left to bright at the right. So the large peak in the in the histogram is telling you that there are a lot of pixels in the image that are in the darkish gray range - those pixels can occur anywhere in the image. The much smaller peak about 2/3 of the way to the right tells you that are another bunch of pixels that are in the brightish gray range, and again the diagram tells you nothing about
where those pixels are.
If you modify the curve by dragging up the portion of the line that's in the lower gray range, you'll brighten all of the pixels that are darkish gray, no matter where they are (left, right, top, bottom) in the image.