Quick Tip #4 - Creating a Duotone Image

Here's the link to the Duotone Action for Photoshop I mentioned. It's is the easy way out of making a Duotone image, but so much faster than doing it manually.

There's also a Duotone Simulation available here for GIMP as well as a good Sepiatone Tutorial here.

So below is a snappy tutorial on creating a duotone image. You'll need to preload these duotone presets before going ahead with the work. Just unzip them and save them to a safe location, you'll be using them later.

Step 1. Open a copy of the original image you wish to work with.

Step 2. Desaturate the image (Shift+Ctrl+U) and then using the Brightness/Contrast sliders (menu Image|Adjustments|Brightness/Contrast), raise or lower the contrast accordingly to get your black and whites balanced.

Step 3. Open the Duotone dialogue box (menu item Image|Mode|Duotone).

Step 4. In the Duotone options box, there are three choices; duotone, tritone or quadtone (I prefer duotone for most shots). Select which method you prefer from the 'Type' drop down menu. This is where loading the presets comes in.

Step 5. Select 'Load' in the dialogue box. From the duotones/tritones pre-set folder, navigate to where you saved presets, and double click on one of them. This loads the preset into the duotones dialogue box and applies the tone to your photo accordingly.

Note: You can adapt and save your own customised duotones by clicking on one or more colors in the duotone dialogue box. When you do this, either the ‘Colour picker’ or ‘Pantone’ color box will appear. Choose the color you want and select ‘Ok.’

Step 6. If you like, you can further modify the pantone settings by clicking in the ‘Curve’ area to the left of the pantone colour box. This will change the colour brightness across different parts of the spectrum. I don't really see the point of it as you can make adjustments later by applying different Layer filters as required, but each to their own.

Step 7. When you're satisfied with your colours in the ‘Duotone Curve’ option box, Select ‘Ok’, then select ‘Save’ in the Duotone box to save your customised duotone into your pre-sets folder.

Step 8. I like to use a small amount of Diffuse Glow (menu Filter|Distort|Diffuse Glow) and an even smaller amount of Gaussian Blur (menu Filter|Blur|Gaussian Blur) at about Radius 0.5 pixels to take the edge off the sharpness a bit (it's a favourite). You could also apply a Film Grain filter if you want to further enhance the image, but experiment until you're happy.

Step 9. Before you can save the file as a JPG, you'll have to convert back to RGB color (menu item Image|Mode|RGB Colour).


That's it!


Happy snapping ;)