- Applying "Looks" Using Creative Profiles
- Virtual Copies- The "No Risk" Way to Experiment
- Using Presets for One-Click Looks
- Creating Your Own Presets
- Creating Presets That Automatically Adapt to Your Image's ISO
- Other Places to Apply Presets
- Changing Individual Colors
- How to Add Edge Darkening (Vignette) Effects
- The "Gritty City" Look
- Creating a Matte Look
- Making Great Duotones
- Creating Black- and-White Images
- Sun Flare Effect
- Painting Beams of Light
- Making Streets Look Wet
- Quick and Easy Spotlight Effect
- Adding a Light to the Background
- Getting the "Orange and Teal" Look
- Creating Panoramas
- Creating HDR Images
- Creating HDR Panos
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Making Great Duotones
This is such a simple technique, but it’s so effective. I learned this trick years ago from my buddy and Adobe Worldwide Evangelist, Terry White, who learned it from another photographer who works for Adobe, and now I’m passing it on to you. Of all the methods I’ve used to create duotones over the years, this is definitely the easiest, but crazily enough, it’s also the best.
Step One:
Although the actual duotone is created in the Color Grading panel (in the right side panels), to get the classic duotone look, you should convert your image to black and white first. So, go to the Profile Browser, by clicking on the icon with the four little rectangles in the top right of the Basic panel, and scroll down to the B&W profiles (see page 212 for more on these). For now, just find one that looks good to you as a starting point, click on it to apply your black-and-white conversion (I chose B&W 04 here), and then click the Close button in the top right of the browser. Note: You can get this before/after view by pressing the Y key on your keyboard.
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Step Two:
The trick to creating duotones is actually incredibly simple: you only add the color tint in the shadows, and you leave the highlights and midtones completely untouched (as tempting as it may be to mess with them, don’t do it). Go down to the Color Grading panel and you’ll see three color wheels. The bottom-left wheel controls the shadows, so click-and-hold in the center of the wheel and drag just a little ways upward toward a brown tone (as shown here). The farther you drag, the more saturated and vivid the color becomes, but we want a subtle amount of tint here, so just drag a little ways from that center. You can rotate that outside orange pin a little to dial in the exact brownish hue you want (or you could choose a different hue, maybe a blue or reddish duo color). That’s it.
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