Learning how to create a duotone image in photoshop is a simple way to enhance an image.
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Creating a duotone image in photoshop is an easy way to give an image an old time feel or to give it that little splash of color which it might have been missing. A duotone image is essentially adding a color overlay onto the top of a black and white image. The easiest way to imagine this is to look at almost any old magazine and find a sepia looking image. When the magazine printed that image they first printed the picture using only black ink dots, then they printed on top of that using a sepia color ink. The black ink, because it is darker, is still the basis for the foundation and the darker parts of the image, but the sepia dots can be seen more clearly in the highlights and lighter areas of the image.
Duotone imaging is an important tool for any digital photographer who is serious about printing images. Printing a digital black and white image on a printer is one of the most frustrating experiences that any photographer can have. This is because a black and white image in photoshop has 256 black tones. When a printer tries to recreate this using only one black ink it's nearly impossible and thus the printer creates an unreliable coloration on most black and white images. When you make a duotone image your telling the printer to combine, black and yellow, or black and purple, which is a lot easier for it to do and will result in more control over your prints.
Creating a duotone image in photoshop is very easy. The first step is to chose your image, I've chosen an image from New Mexico when I was there last summer. My first instinct was to leave it as a simple black and white photograph, but I decided that the overall feel of the photo would be better if it had an earthy tone.
The first step is to convert your image to grayscale. First I used the channel mixer to create a monotone image. There are tons of great tutorials on how to use the channel mixer to create a monotone image check them out if you don't know how to use this great tool. Usually the first step in editing a photo is to do curves and levels adjustments, however, when you convert the image to grayscale photoshop flattens the image so making those adjustments beforehand is a waste of time. To convert the image to grayscale go to, image, mode, then click on grayscale. It will then ask you if you want to flatten the image, click on flatten and your image with turn to grayscale.
The next step in making a duotone image is picking out the color of the overlay. We do this by going to image, mode, then click on duotone. This will bring up the duotones dialogue box which looks like this.
As far as dialogue boxes in photoshop go this is one of the more simple ones. In the upper left corner you have the option of creating a monotone, duotone, tritone, or quad-tone image. A monotone image is the image which you got when you converted the photo to grayscale. A duotone image is Ink 2 “printed” over Ink 1. A tritone image would be Ink 3, printed over Ink 2, printed over Ink 1. A quad-tone image is Ink 4 over Ink 3 over Ink 2 over Ink 1. To change the color of any of the inks click on the color square and a color libraries dialogue box will pop up. Depending on what version of photoshop your using this dialogue box will have any multitude of options, any color you could ever imagine as at your disposal here. Play around with the color picker until you find the color which you want to use in your image, I chose Pantone 451 C. Click OK when you have decided on a duotone color to use.
The next step is to play with the curves for the color which you chose. To open up the curve just click on the box to the left of the color which you want to mess with. This will open up a curves dialogue which operates the same as any other curves dialogue. When your done messing about here click ok, then ok again and you have your duotone image. Once you have this image you can now do almost anything you want to it that you would do to any image in photoshop, but remember this image has no color data so you won't be able to do hue/saturation adjustments or any adjustment which requires color data.
I learned alot about this. Had no idea what it meant. Thank you!
Posted by: Linda Ferrell Jan 27, 2009 @ 10:18 AM EST
Good article, but it save it in a psd format. How do I change it to a jpg. I saved it to a raw format, but it messed up the picture badly when I reopened it.
Posted by: Tom Collins Jan 27, 2009 @ 11:31 AM EST
