Last fall we introduced a new creativity series at CM called “Photoshop Fifteenth” spearheaded by Sarah Wilkerson. Posted on the fifteenth of every month this series may include any combination of exercises that ask you to get creative in Photoshop. It may include simple Picture Plays, Compositing, Photo Manipulation, Retouching, Tutorial-based-Exercises, Photoshop Games, and more! It has been so inspiring watching what our members have come up with that I’m going to start sharing this series on the blog as well. Enjoy!
Photoshop Fifteenth #1: Split Toning
We’ll launch the Photoshop Fifteenth series with a tutorial-exercise. The best part of this tutorial, IMHO, will be seeing the examples that participants provide by posting the results of their exercise. And with that, let’s do it!
Split toning refers to the collection of darkroom techniques that used chemical processes to tint the shadow tones of a print with one color and highlight tones with another color. The typical split contrasts warm and cool colors (such as yellow highlights versus blue shadows). Split Toning was originally used to colorize black and white images but may be applied to color images as well (I personally prefer to use light split toning on color images!).
This week, create and post an image that illustrates split toning. Some of you may know or have worked with the Split Toning sliders in Lightroom/ACR (I LOVE using them!), and although technically this is a Photoshop challenge, you are welcome to use any technique that you so choose …. HOWEVER, no actions are allowed … jump in and get your hands dirty with this one!
For those who have never worked with split toning, there are a number of approaches, but here’s a very simple way to replicate the darkroom effect:
1) (Optional) Convert your image to black and white using your preferred method.
2) Add a Color Balance Adjustment Layer
3) Select “Highlights” from the Tone options
4) Drag the Color Balance sliders towards the tint you want to assign to your highlights; the further you drag the slider, the greater the intensity of your highlight color. If you want to mix colors, move more than one slider (if, for example, you’d like to create orange-tinted highlights, move your sliders towards both yellow and red).
5) Now select “Shadows” from the Tone options
6) Again, drag the Color Balance sliders towards the tint you want to assign to your shadows; move multiple sliders as desired. Keep in mind that a warm-highlight-vs-cool-shadow (or cool-highlight-vs-warm-shadow) combination is the traditional approach.
Members were to post original (pre-split-toning) and split-toned image — and let us know the parameters (colors/values) used.
Sarah’s examples:
* Preserve Luminosity was UNCHECKED in the above. Sarah finds that this is more faithful to the LR/ACR split toning.
And some from our members who rock, as usual.
Starla:
Shadows: +45, +5, +6
Highlights: -51, -75, -92
Erin Portch:
Shadows: -33, +29, +13
Highlights: +31, -19, -24
Melissa:
Highlights +53 -17 -4
Shadows -9 +41 -14
Lia Lotito:
Shadows: +26 Red, -11 Magenta, -28 Yellow
Highlights: +12 Red, +2 Green, -9 Yellow
Krisanne:
Thanks for a fantastic exercise, Sarah and to all our members for always being such enthusiastic participants – you are all awesome!!
This was a super fun exercise! Nice work girls!
this is VERY interesting! so many different effects are achieved by this! i'll have to investigate further!
I love this effect! I am going to have to try this later this afternoon. Thanks for sharing.
Trina
I <3 it! Thank you so much!
I really enjoyed reading this, will have to give it a go. :)
Can someone tell me how I do step two? How do I add the color adjustment layer? Thank you!!!