Make Dazzling Duotones

Duotones are a quick way of adding impact to a photo. Here’s a look at how they’re created

When done well, monochrome shots can be jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The best ones are oozing with drama and impact and make a very handsome addition to any photo frame. However, duotones can be even more impressive. Instead of straight black and white, a colour tint is added to produce a richer appearance. A lot of black-and-white fine art photography books are actually printed as duotones of black and grey inks to increase the tonal range. Adding duotones in Photoshop is quite straightforward to do, but there are a couple of things to watch out for. For starters, you shouldn’t avoid the curve adjustments. This controls how much of the colour tint will be injected into the highlights, midtones and shadows of the image. Secondly, if you’re sending your image to a professional printers, you will need to assign separate screen angles, from the Output options in the Print with Preview window, but this is for a future tutorial. For now, let’s get started with creating beautiful duotones for printing at home.

01

Go grey Open up your start image and load it into Photoshop. The first job is to convert it to greyscale. You have to do this to access the duotone option. Before this, go to Image>Adjustments>Shadow/Highlights, and set Shadows to 4 and Highlights to 2. Now go to Image>Adjustments>Duotone.

02
Double trouble When the Duotone Options window opens, it will be set for a monotone image. To change this, go to the pull-down Type: menu and pick Duotone. You also have the choice of Tritone (three colours) and Quadtone (four colours).

03
Pick your inks Ink 1 is set to black by default, and we’ll keep with this seeing as how most duotones use black and one other colour. If you do want to change the colour of Ink 1, however, just click the black square and pick a new colour from the Color Picker. The box with the diagonal line is called the Curve Box. This allows  you to set how the colour is distributed within the highlights, midtones and shadows.

04
Ink number two Now onto the fun part. To choose a Pantone colour for Ink 2, click on the white square. You’ll then see a list of Pantone colours, because it assumes you’re printing to a professional press. Scroll through the colours and decide on one you like. We’ve gone for Pantone 727C. Click OK.

05
Curve time Now you get to decide how much of your second ink colour appears in the shadows, midtones and highlights. Click the Curve Box next to Ink 2. At the moment the curve is straight, which means an equal amount of colour and black will be distributed. The % areas are the percentage of ink being distributed – so 0% is the highlights and 100% is the shadows.

06
Play with your colour Here we’ve adjusted the 0, 30, 90 and 100% values. This was done by dragging the curve, but you can also manually type in a number to the fields. When you’re happy, click OK.

07
Save and print When you’re happy with the effect, click OK in the Duotone Options window. You can now save your image as an RGB and print it straight out.