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Digital Photography

Tritone Tutorial by Dan Gruskin Learning how to create a duotone image in photoshop is a simple way to enhance an image. Article rating: 6.69

This tutorial will explain how to make a richer black and white photo by using two shades of black as opposed to one. This technique makes the darker parts of the image more three dimensional. To do this we will turn our image into a tritone image then dodge the highlights back into our image.

Just like a duo-tone image, a tritone image uses a concept first developed by printmakers. Where a duotone image is an image using 2 color tones, a tritone image is an image printed using 3 ink colors. The idea behind duo-tone and tritone images is that each color of ink which you chose will be layered on top of the colors below it. In our image we will use 3 layers of black; by doing this we are creating a very dark image. After we make our tritone image we will dodge our highlights back into the picture. Essentially we are creating our own studio backlighting which is why I like to use this technique on photos where the lighting is biased to a direction.

The first step is to choose your image. I have chosen a picture of a shelf full of map tubes. I chose this photo because of the lighting bias. The first step is to do any preliminary editing as you would to any other photograph. I like to bump up the contrast a little bit using a curve and also take out any imperfections in the background. Once we make the picture into a duotone we will lose all of the color data so make sure and tonal changes you will want to make are done during this stage of the game.

In order to turn our mage into a tritone image we must first change the mode to grayscale. We do this by going to the Image menu, then clicking on mode, then click on grayscale. Photoshop may give you a pop-up menu after this, just click ok. Now that our image is in grayscale we can turn it into a tri-tone image. Now we click on the Image menu, go to mode, then duotone and click. This will bring up the duotone menu box. At the top left of the box there is a drop-down menu of options, for this tutorial we will be using tritone. 

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.

Click ok when you are done choosing your colors and you will notice that your image is darker then it was before. Normally this would be a bad thing, but in this case it's good. Our next step is to bring our highlights back into the image. This is going to make our image pop, and give it that studio lighting effect that I was talking about earlier. To do this we are going to use the dodge tool.

© Dan Gruskin

The dodge and burn tool is a tool which many people do not use to its full potential. Dodging and burning not only brightens or darkens an image but this tool can also add contrast and interest to a flat lit picture. For our image I am going to use the dodge tool and set it to the highlights setting. I like to keep the exposure of the brush below 50%. This is the part of the tutorial where all I can tell you is trial and error. What you want to do is keep dodging the highlights of your image, in my case it's the end of the tubes. As you dodge the contrast and the brightness will increase in these areas because you are only brightening the highlights. This step takes a while, don't be surprised if you have to keep dodging for a while. I would recommend to the dodging on a bunch of different layers that are duplicates of the background. This is a safer way so that you don't risk losing all of your hard work in case you lose the ability to undo far back enough. Also it helps to do a bunch of small stroked with the dodge tool then to do big ones, this gives you more control.

Once you are done with the dodging you can make any other adjustments which you would like. Remember though that there is no color data so Photoshop won't let you do color adjustments. In the end you end up with a deeper black and white image. You could have gotten similar results with other black and white methods but I find with this method you have maximum control over the highlights in the image.

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	nice Posted by: pavankumar Jun 17, 2009 @ 9:4 PM EST
	These are nice, simple instructions but I'd appreciate a little more detail about the dodging process. Posted by: Jodz Jul 24, 2009 @ 3:34 AM EST

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