Free Photoshop Tutorials: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - Duotone photo

1. Load the photo
We’ll continue from where we stopped the last time. The previous article dealt with black-and-white photos and after adjusting not only saturation but also hues, we got the picture shown above.

If you find the result a bit boring after all and wish to introduce a little color, you can easily turn it into a so-called duotone photo.

2. Increased saturation
For this you’ll need Split Toning in Develop section of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and the controls found there. With its help, the black-and-white photo can be colored again, or at least two-colored.

First use both sliders of Saturation in the window. Shift them to somewhere around the value 50. At this point saturation value does not matter at all. What is important is to see what happens in the picture, because at 0 saturation value no change can be seen at all. So let’s stick to 50-50 for the time being.

3. Hue
Now comes the main step, defining the two basic colors. Use the Hue slider for this. Under Highlights you can set the hues of the brighter colors, let’s choose a yellowish-brown color now. The Hue slider under Shadow will influence the color of the darker areas. Here we opted for a bluish hue. You can also check the hue in the small windows encircled above.

By these settings, you have grounded the basic atmosphere of the photo. All you still have to do is some fine tuning.

4. A delicate balance
Fine tuning means setting the Balance of the two colors and a more precise setting of Saturation.

Balance slider will define which of the two colors should dominate. Saturation will heighten or repress them. It’s totally up to you what value you choose. We refined the balance to the benefit of the dark blue, that is, the blue areas (Balance: 24), but pushed saturation a bit down (Shadows Saturation: 42). At the same time we increased the yellow a bit (Highlights Saturation: 82).

5. Let’s see…
… what we cooked up. Click the switch in the upper left corner of Split Toning window to shift between the original and the modified version, but the changes will surely be obvious even without this.

Not a bad try! The dark areas got a homogenous bluish hue, while the brighter areas now have a yellowish character to them.

You can now save the picture, or if you don’t like it, you can keep experimenting with other hues.