Now that black-and-white photos are more popular than ever, there seems to be quite a bit of interest in toned images that mimic platinum or selenium looks as well. Thanks to the toning features built into Photoshop, it’s relatively easy to make these types of images.
To get started, you first need to do a basic black-and-white conversion. If you’re using Photoshop CS3 or CS4, this is best done with either the Channel Mixer or the Black-and-White command. Figure 1 shows the image I’m starting with, a photo of Yosemite Falls captured from Sentinel Dome.
Figure 1
Once you’ve converted your image to black and white, throw out the color information by selecting Image > Mode > Grayscale. Now you can select the toning options from Image > Mode > Duotone (Figure 2)
Figure 2
You’ll use the same dialog to do duotone, tritone, or quadtone images. The only difference is the number of tones you have to work with.
Let’s start with a duotone to see how the process works. When you first open the Duotone dialog, only one color box will be active. So select Duotone from the popup menu. All of the different color libraries in Photoshop are available for you to work with. I prefer working with the Pantone libraries because the organization is so logical. Click on the black square to start, opening the Color Picker. Now, select Pantone from the Color Libraries (Figure 3).
Figure 3
I’ll do a platinum-toned image to start with. The first color to select (Ink 1) is your darkest tone. In this example I’m going with Pantone 432 C from the Pantone Solid Matte library.
For Ink 2, I select Pantone 421 C (Figure 4). This is my lightest color. Every tone in the image will be within the Ink 1 and Ink 2 range. Where the real power comes in is with the ability to control the curve for each ink color by clicking on the box next to the color sample (Figure 5). While this looks very much like the curves dialog you’re used to, the curve works differently with duotones.
Figure 4
Figure 5
While the standard curves control determines highlight and shadow strength and ramp, the curves control in the Duotones dialog determines the ink volume for that color. In this case, I’ve lowered the levels quite a bit to open up this image detail. You can view the color ramp at the bottom of the curve to get an idea of how the adjustments are affecting your image. Like a standard curves adjustment, click to place a point, and drag up or down to adjust that point.
Here’s the result of my adjustments with a final duotone (Figure 6):
Figure 6
By using more color options you can have even greater control over the finished image while still maintaining much more control over how the colors are applied. Figure 7 shows the settings I’ve used for a tritone version of the Yosemite Falls shot (Figure 8).
Figure 7
Figure 8
As you can see, there is much more image depth and finer variation in the tritone version than in the duotone.
One of the nice things about the duotone dialog is the ability to save your adjustments as presets for future use. If you’re doing a series of images for a show or portfolio, this ensures you have a consistent look from one image to another, something that isn’t easily done with a standard conversion.
Figure 9 shows a sample of a quadtone image where I’ve selected colors from both the Pantone Solid Matte and Pantone Pastel color libraries. Being able to mix color libraries for your tones gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility in creating just the look you’re going for. I’ve found these softer colors are popular with the high school senior crowd (at least the female students) who are looking for something different but aren’t quite ready for the grunge look that is all the rage now.
Figure 9
Finally, if you’re not the type who likes to experiment, Adobe includes a number of excellent presets that you can load and use as is, or modify as needed. To access these presets, click on the menu icon next to the Preset popup menu, and choose Load Preset. Navigate to the Photoshop/Presets folder, and open the Duotones, Tritones, or Quadtones folder. Figure 10 shows a sample from this library, a tritone made from the BMY Sepia 4 preset.
Figure 10
