How to recreate the math behind photoshop curves

Question

Basically, what I want to do is understand how to calculate the values along a \'curve\' as represented here in the photoshop curves box:

Answer 1

A Catmull-Rom Spline is used because it's a kind of spline that represents a curve in which you can add control points and refine the curve itself (that is what you do on Photoshop when you click to add a new point), with the particularity to have the curve pass by every control point you specify.

In any case you just need a function that taken a value (float in 0..1 or int in 0..255 or whatever color space you have) will produce another one.

float fun(float x) {
  y = /* something */
  return y;
}

This can be done with whatever kind of function of course. The most basic one is the default one that is an identity function

float fun(float x) {
  y = x;
  return y;
}

Any other function can be calculated with curves and it will be ok but more complex to develop, I'd suggest you to start from simple examples like a Bezier curve. In any case the t parameter is used because these are parametric curves, you need to understand some of the mathematical background of curves before digging into development, take a look here.