Thursday, August 8th, 2013

Lightroom Tip – Using a Split Tone effect on a Black and White Image

Split Toning a Black and White Image – learn how to make the Highlights and Shadows Different Colors

Split Toning applies one color to the highlights and another to the shadows in an image.

Good color choices when applying a split tone are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel such as magenta and green, blue and yellow, or red and cyan – although you can choose any combination you like.

To apply the split tone effect, drag on the Hue slider or click the color picker to choose a color to use for the Highlights and then choose something else to use for the Shadows.

Adjust the Saturation of the colors as desired.

Balance allows you to fine tune how the colors are applied to the image – drag to the left to adjust the balance towards the shadow color and drag to the right to add more of the highlight color.

Helen Bradley

Thursday, July 18th, 2013

Lightroom Tip – Adjusting the contrast and tonal range in an image

Using the Tone Curve to Adjust your Image

Using the Tone Curve, you have the choice of preset settings: Linear, Medium Contrast or Strong Contrast. Use these as a starting point for adjusting the image.

Select the starting point then drag the Highlights and Lights sliders to the right to lighten these areas. Drag to the left on the Darks slider to darken the Darks. To bring detail out of the shadows, drag to the right on the Shadows slider.

Helen Bradley

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Split toning in Photoshop

By Helen Bradley

Split Toning is an effect which has its origins in the days of film and it involves tinting the highlights in a black and white image one color and the shadows another color. The best results are where you use opposite colors for each, such as yellow and blue, green and magenta and so on.

If you are a Lightroom user you’ve probably experimented with the very cool Split Toning tool in the Develop module. However, you can achieve a similar effect in Photoshop with just a little more work.

Here’s how to create the effect in Photoshop:

Start by creating a black and white image using your favorite tool in Photoshop. I’m using Photoshop CS4 so I’m using the Black & White filter but you could use the Channel Mixer or Hue/Saturation and drag the Saturation slider into -100.

To create the split tone effect you can use a Color Balance adjustment layer as it lets you isolate the highlights and shadows in the image and to apply different colors to each. To start, choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance and click to select the Highlight tones. Now adjust the color sliders until you get a pleasing color in the image highlights.

Click the Shadows tone selector to isolate the shadows in the image and adjust the color sliders to get a pleasing color in the Shadows.

If necessary you may want to select the highlights again and fine tune the color used so it complements the color you’ve chosen for the shadows.

You can consider your image done for now or you can apply a filter effect. Here I’ve created a flattened image layer by pressing Control + Alt + Shift + E (Command + Option + Shift + E on a Mac) and applied a Diffuse Glow filter (Filter > Distort > Diffuse Glow) to it before blending the layer back into the underlying image.

Helen Bradley