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Split Toning Fully toning a photograph can produce a great effect, but split toning can often achieve more interesting effects. One traditional technique was to interrupt sepia toning when only the hightlights had been effected by the sepia leaving the shadows and midtones still largely dark greys and blacks. This could be further developed by adding a blue tone which worked on the shadows. The final print would benefit from having rich dark blue shadows and midtones with delicate sepia highlights, obviously other tones could be used it was simply a matter of experimenting and playing around to get the effect you were after.
1
Change the image to monochrome using the channel mixer adjustment layer,
2 Add a sepia tone
to the highlights, it may also be beneficial to add some sepia to the
midtones to counter the heavier blue tones we will add later.
3 Finally add a blue tone to the shadows, we do this by using the existing colour balance adjustment layer, simply by double clicking on its icon in the layer palette ( you could also do the same by using another colour balance adjustment layer. Then adjust the Cyan - Red slider by moving it to the left, and the Yellow - Blue slider to the right.
If the blue overpowers the sepia you can add some more sepia to the image by adjusting the midtones in a similar way to stage 2, only ensure that the midtone button is selected. The final amounts of each colour is totally down to your preferences and the desired effect you want to achieve. We now have one tone simply on top of the other, not really a split toned print. The way we achieve the true split tone is to adjust the blending options, by right clicking the adjustment layer to view the layer style dialog box. In the blend if section at the bottom of the box drag the black triangle somewhere close to the 60 mark. This only allows pixels lighter than 60 to be visible, to achieve a full split tone we must blend this transisition to allow a smoother range of tones. We do this by clicking on the right side of the black triangle whilst holding the alt key, this allows the triangle to split into two. Then simply moving the right triangle to the right to roughly 200 which creates a smooth range of tones and our desired effect.
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