21. CREATING DUOTONES AND TINTED IMAGES

ANOTHER WAY YOU can give your images a classic look is by tinting them. This process is very straightforward and opens the door to a lot of creative interpretations of your work. Let’s take a quick tour of how tinting works, and then go over a couple of things you should consider when you are making your own custom looks.

The Split Toning panel allows you to change the tint of your image. It contains two settings: Highlights and Shadows (Figure 21.2). These two settings are responsible for the coloring of the highlight and shadow tones in the picture. When you click on the Highlights swatch you are presented with a color bar where you can use an eyedropper tool to select the color you wish to use (Figure 21.3). You can also enter a Hue setting manually by clicking on the number next to the H below the color bar and inputting a number, or by scrolling on the number. You can change the Saturation with the S slider.

Now click on the Shadows swatch and you’ll see the exact same settings. The only change here is that there’s a dot on the color bar to show you what setting you picked for the Highlights color, which is a nice touch (Figure 21.4). The arrows next to the Highlights and Shadows swatches open Hue and Saturation sliders that you can adjust without seeing the color bar, but I think it’s much better to visually select the colors you want to use by clicking on the color bar.

When you’re tinting an image in Lightroom, remember that you are tinting only the shadows and highlights of the image. If you are working with a color image, there will be a little bit of a color bleed in the midtones. If you’d like to eliminate this, I recommend that you make a good black-and-white image before you do any tinting (Figure 21.5).

Want to try a quick sepia-inspired tinting? Set your Highlights to 60,40 and your Shadows to 30,24, and you’re done (Figure 21.6)!

While it’s tempting to use this tool to create a sepia-toned image (everyone tries the sepia look at least once), I like to use the tinting to create a little bit of a different black-and-white image. Once you’ve converted your image to black and white, set your Highlights to 237,24 and your Shadows to 48,7, and the black-and-white image will have a little bit of a blue tint that gives it a different feel than just a desaturation of color (Figure 21.7).

Figure 21.1 We’ll use the previous picture of NYC as our starting point.

Figure 21.2 The Split Toning panel allows you to adjust the tint of an image.

Figures 21.3–21.4 Changing the Highlights and Shadows creates a cool tint look. Notice that the Shadows color bar has a dot to mark the color that was picked for the Highlights.

Share Your Best Tinted Image!

Once you’ve created your best tinted image, share it with the Enthusiast’s Guide community! Follow @EnthusiastsGuides and post your image to Instagram with the hashtag #EGTint. Don’t forget that you can also search that same hashtag to view all the posts and be inspired by what others are shooting.

Figure 21.5 Tinted images look much better when you start with a black-and-white image.

Figure 21.6 A sepia-toned image.

Figure 21.7 Adding a slight blue tint to a black-and-white image gives it a different look.