Dreamy Duotone Effect

This tutorial shows how to change a colour portrait into a dreamy duotone image using Adobe Photoshop.

1.     Open the image you want to apply this effect. I am going to start with this portrait taken at Consett Photographic Society's portrait night.

2.     Go to ” Image” -> “Mode” and select “Greyscale”. A message will pop up asking you if you want to discard colour information, click OK and continue.

3.     Go again at “Image” -> “Mode” but this time select “Duotone”. Select colors depending on the toning that you want to give to your photo. I have chosen two shades of blue as shown in the below image:

4.     Now for the dreamy effect we are going to use the popular method of blurring.
Duplicate your layer (Ctrl-J) and on the top layer apply a Gaussian blur (Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur). The optimum radius depends on the size and the detail of your photo and the effect you want to achieve so experiment with the settings. In this example I used a radius of 20 pixels.

5.     Set the layer mode to “Overlay” and we are finished.

6.     All that is left to do now is merging the layers and changing the image mode back to RGB (Image->Mode->RGB Color)

Here is my final result.