Split-tones refer to both warm and cold tones simultaneously present in an image. You often see split toning being used in contemporary fashion, lifestyle and landscape images, but the technique itself has been around since the early darkroom days. To change the appearance of a straight black and white photo, chemical toners were often used after processing and fixing the images. Today it’s very easy to split tone both your B&W and colour photos digitally in post processing.
When selling images for commercial use, thinking about colour could benefit you in many ways. We often have customers asking us for “authentic images, but with that polished look” or “real every day, but with that Instagram filter type of colours”. Experimenting with colour tones is a great way to develop your own specific style too, which can make it easier to stand out from the crowd. There is no correct answer on how you should edit your photos, it is all down to your own preferences. However, the technique used in this tutorial is a great starting point to learn about colour tones as it’s a way of working with images and it leaves you a lot of room for experimentation.
Step by step
The image below is showing you the result we’re going to get by making the following adjustments in Photoshop.
- Go to layers on your top menu bar and add a new adjustment layer for changing your levels. For this example I changed my black output levels to 27 (The values given might vary a bit from image to image, so might need to be adjusted accordingly). Working in the same panel, change the colour option from RGB to blue.
- Now set the black and white output levels to 12 and 237. As you can see in the example below I have made some small adjustments to the sliders on the levels graph as well.
- Create a solid colour layer by clicking on the black and white circular icon at the bottom of your layers panel. Choose a colour that you have in mind for your photo (different types of blue often work well), I went with the colour Riverside #4C6A92, one of .
- Using the options on top of your layers, change the layer from normal to exclusion and lower the opacity to around 46%. By this point your image should be slightly faded and have a vintage film look to it.
- Solidify the colours by adding a new adjustment layer, this time for changing the curves. Work with the highlights and shadows to bring back some contrast, this can be done by creating a small S shape of the diagonal line in the graph.
- Go back to the circular icon at the bottom of your layers and select gradient. I used a gradient fill that went from navy blue to orange. If this one in particular does not exist in your presets you can just create a new one. After selecting my gradient fill, I tweaked the angle of the gradient layer so the cold blue tones will hit the shadows in my image and the warm yellow tones will appear in the highlights.
- Change the layer from normal to overlay. This will create a horrendous result with very stark contrasts, but don’t worry it will tone down as soon as you lower the opacity.
- Select a new gradient, but this time around choose a colour to transparent gradient and pick a very light colour similar to what I’ve used here (#fef7de). Change the style from linear to radial and drag it to an area of the photo which you would like to lighten up. This layer will need to be changed from normal to soft light.
- I repeated this step again to bring out the light both where it hits the dress from the top left corner and in the background around the faded out flowers.
- Add another solid colour layer. We started with adding a blue layer in the beginning, so this time I chose a colour that brings out the warmer tones in the image. The colour is named Dusty Cedar (#AD5D5D). It actually does look a bit dusty, but it has plenty of warmth in it and compliments the other colours in the image very well.
- Finally, change the layer from normal to soft light and lower the opacity all the way down to around 8%.
Want to see more images using the same effect? Here are a few photos to spark your inspiration from the ڹϳcollection:
