Toned Color Photographs

October 24th, 2008 | Categories: Photoshop, Tutorial

Let me start off by saying that I don’t really know what to call this effect. A classic effect that is pretty straight forward to create is the black and white photographs in which a single important element is left in color. This effect creates a toned image in which the color hues are not eliminated but subdued and curve mapped tone in added. The main focus of the image retains most of its color and is given only slight toning. And , finally, some vignetting is added.

If this sounds like something you’d like to try you can

For those who know their way around Photoshop here are the basic steps:

Open the image in Photoshop
Make a duplicate of the image
Convert the duplicate to a toned image
Copy and paste the duplicate image as a new layer on the original image
Reduce the opacity of the toned layer to something like 65%
Add a layer mask (revealing all) to the tone image layer
Using black ink, paint on the layer mask to reveal the original image underneath
Use the brightness/contrast adjustment on the layer mask to add back a little tone to the main subject
Add a new layer set to overlay mode and filled with 50% gray
Use the circular marquee tool to select the main focus of the image
Feather the selection with a very large radius (I use 250)
Invert the selection
Fill the layer with black
Reduce the layers fill percentage to adjust vignetting to taste

Now, for those who are still learning how to use Photoshop (and who isn’t), I’ll go through the steps in a little more detail and show how I created the title image above. First, though, here is the original picture. This image is just popping with color.

The first two steps are pretty basic, open the image in photoshop and create a duplicate of it. The image that I’m starting with has already been "processed" to get to it’s current state. To keep things as simple as possible lets make sure that the image is a single layer. There’s no reason why it needs to be other than to keep the screenshots of the layer stack as clear as possible.

To create the duplicate simply use the Image|Duplicate command. The name of the duplicate is not important because the document is transient. We’ll only need it for a few minutes.

The third step, converting the duplicate to a toned image, is a bit more difficult. This is really two steps, convert the image to a black and white, then convert it to a duotone, tritone, or quadtone image. There are several ways of creating a toned image in Photoshop. I’ll show two methods here. The first uses only tools that come with photoshop. The second uses Fred Miranda’s BW Workflow Pro plugin.

The Photoshop Method
My preferred method of creating a black and white image in Photoshop is to use the Channel Mixer in monochrome mode. I open the channel mixer (Image|Adjustments|Channel Mixer) and check the monochrome checkbox at the bottom of the dialog. Then I adjust the channel sliders to get a black and white conversion that it pleasing to my eye. For this image I choose to use 100% of the green channel and none of the red and blue channel. Many times I’ll use the red channel, but in this image the contrast between the skin and the dresses is lost in the red channel but maintained nicely in the green channel. This is the channel mixer dialog:

And this is the resultant black and white conversion:

Now I need to create a toned image from this. I will use the duotone image mode. If you look under the Image|Mode menu you’ll see the duotone mode. It is grayed out. The duotone mode is not available because the image is still in RGB mode. The image must first be converted to grayscale, then I’ll be able to convert to the duotoned mode. So first I simply choose Image|Mode|Grayscale to convert the image to grayscale. Then I chose Image|Mode|Duotone and am presented with this dialog:

Now I need to decide wether I want a monotone, duotone, tritone, or quadtone image (using the mode dropdown). Creating toned coversion is an art in and of itself and, more importantly, a subject of a future article. For this image I’m just going to use one of the predefined tone sets that get installed with Photoshop. First, I select Tritone from the Type selector. The I press the Load button, navigate to the TRITONE/Process Tritones directory and select the BMY brown 1.ado file. The preset is loaded and the dialog now looks like:

Hit OK and the image is converted to a tritone image seen below:

That’s it. I’ve created a tritone image using only the tools available in Photoshop.

Now, the easy way:

The Fred Miranda BW Workflow Pro Method

Fred Miranda created his BW Workflow Pro plugin to make it simple to create nice black and white and toned images. I load the plugin from the File|Automate|BW Workflow Pro menu and select the following settings:

I select the BW+Green Filter (which would be similar to the choice I used above). I also chose the sepia(medium) tritone setting. I hit the OK button and get this image:

I like this image better than the first one so I’ll use it.

Combine the Color and Toned Image

Now I have toned image that I’m happy with. It’s time to combine the two images. With the toned image document selected in Photoshop I type Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C to select and copy to entire image to the clipboard. Then I select the original image and type Ctrl-V to paste the toned image as a new layer over the original image. After renaming the new layer "Toned Image", I adjust the opacity of the Tone Image layer to 75%. The important part of the image to pay attention to here is the background. I choose the opacity to let just a little bit of color back into the background while maintaining most of the tritone. This image looks like:

Now I want to bring back some more color in the main subject. The easiest way to do this it to add a layer mask to the layer. I do this by selecting the Toned Image layer and pressing the Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layer palette.

This adds a layer mask to the current layer. The layer mask will default to "reveal all", that is it will show everything on the layer and will be filled with white. Now I’m going to use different shades of gray to blend in areas from the layer underneath. My goal is to bring in some more of the color from the main subject in the original image. For this image I want to bring in the color of the dresses, flowers, and skin. I don’t want to reveal all the color in the underlying layer, but I want the flower boquets, in particular to pop. For the dresses and skin I’ll use a 50% gray to paint on the layer mask. For the flowers, I’ll go ahead and use black to reveal all of the color from the original image on the background layer. This is what the layer mask looks like:

And this is the layer stack at this point:

And this is what the image looks like:

The image above is a rollover image. If you roll your mouse over the image you’ll see the original blended image. You can easily see how emphasizing the color in the main subject adds to the appeal of the image.

Add Some Vignetting

Now I want to add some vignetting to further bring focus on the group and to the bride in particular. I’ll do this by adding two overlay layers. The first layer will brighten the bride a bit, while the second will darken the corners of the image in a classic vignette.

I use overlay layers so often that I’ve create an action that does it and assigned it to my F2 key. To add the first overlay layer select the topmost layer in the layer stack, then simply chose Layer|New|Layer… from the main menu. This will bring up the add layer dialog box. I setup the dialog like this:

I give the layer a name, the Mode is set to Overlay, and I check the Fill with Overlay-neutral color checkbox. An overlay layer filled with neutral 50% gray will have no effect on the image. Adding gray that is lighter than 50% will lighten the underlying image. Adding gray that is darker then 50% gray will darken the underlying image.

To emphasize the bride I’ll lighten the overlay layer, but only that which lies above the bride. I do this by using the circular marquee tool to drag a large oval around the bride:

With the bride selected, I feather the selection with a very large radius (usually 250 pixels, the maximum allowed, when I’m working on 8MP images). Then I fill the selection with white. Initially this will completely overdo the effect and the bride will be blown out. I lower the opacity of the layer to obtain the effect I want. In this case, I end up at 30%. The rollover image below shows the before and after effect:

Next I want to add the classic vignette to the image. I add another overlay layer in exactly the same manner as above. This one I call Vignette. Again, using the circular marquee tool, I select the a large oval that surrounds the bridal party:

I feather the selection with a 250 pixel radius and then invert the selection so that the active selection will be the outside of the oval. I fill the selection with black to darken the outer edges of the image. Just as white was too strong for the bride at 100% opacity, black is too strong for the vignette. I lower the opacity of the layer to 30% percent to get the effect the I want. Here is the before and after rollover showing the vignetting:

The last thing I do is add just a bit of contrast back into the image using a curves adjustment layer and applying just a little bit of an s-curve. The curves dialog looks like:

Here is the final layer stack:

And here is the final image. Roll your mouse over it to compare it with the original image.

I like the effect. It adds a nice mood. It doesn’t work with every photograph so you’ll have to try a few and get a feel for when it works and when it doesn’t. Of course, there will always be someone who doesn’t like an effect that you do, but that’s OK. I’ve had people look at this effect on an image and say "I really like it" and others who say "Doesn’t work for me". Do what you like. Do what the client likes. But it’s nice to give people a choice.

Try using different tones. The example above used a brown toned image. I’ve used other tones in other image. There’s no hard and fast rule that determine what tone to use. Play with it, see what you like. But most of all, have fun doing it.

Here are some other before-and-after rollovers of images with this effect: