Grand Canyon Desert View

Greetings. Attempting to understand duotone. I took this a few years ago (through the gift shop window) just after Thanksgiving. I rolled my own processing but the result can be fairly closely replicated using the PS duotone tool (Image->Mode->Duotone on Grayscale Mode images). I have a homegrown plugin that I can map a black-white grayscale to black-orange (nice orange skies like Diane's IR shot ;-). Overlay or Soft Light Blending opacity adjustments with the original grayscale desaturates to taste. This can be done in the Duotone tool by choosing a desaturated target color. For instance, moving the color picker from orange (top right corner with 255-128-0 selected) to the left along the top edge of the color picker. You can see the transformation in the duotone output. Kinda cool.

So, the whole process was Silver Efex to monochrome, Apply black to orange scale (my own plugin), Soft Light Blend (about 40% opacity over monochrome), touch up.

Similar results with Silver Efex to monochrome, Mode change to 8-bit Grayscale, Image->Mode->Duotone, Type:Duotone, Ink 2 use color picker - type in 255-128-0 in RGB typeins), slide color picker along top of box to select a desaturated target (here, somewhere around 254-206-156 or just type that in for previous step), Change mode back to RGB.

Oh, I should say that I used to do this sort of thing by using a solid color fill layer, blending then adjusting the tone. The processes above deliver much more satisfying results (for me). So, thanks again for another great theme. I always learn a lot from working them.

Thanks for looking.

Cheers,

-Michael-

Just beautiful Michael. The toning is perfect! Beautiful vista!

Great image, Michael. Beautiful tones to give dimension and depth to the canyon. Thanks also for your detailed workflow explanation.

Yes, beautiful! I'm scratching my head, too. There are a lot of presets in the Image > Mode > Duotone menu, some of which are tri- or quad-tones, to give anyone an idea. But as you point out, they basically look like colorized monotones. As I understand, the "real thing" is an old technique for offset printing, to get richer deep tones than the 4 inks (CMYK) would normally render.

So, my question about split-toning would be a very different technique, in terms of results. And now I remember the original question, which was about cross-processing, which is yet another step away.

So I'll stick to the real McCoy here, and just toss out the split tones and cross processed images outside of the theme.

Very well done! Wonderful flow of dark to medium to light as the eye moves from the foreground to the background, and with lots of details in between! The horizontal clouds add very nicely to the lines of the image, and help take your eye back into the farthest depths of the image. Much appreciate your complete explanation.

Michael, thanks for the detailed explanation - the results speak for themself:S3:

Beautiful image, Michael! Love the sweeping vista and the toning is perfect. Thanks for the detailed explanation of your process.

Classic landscape and tonality. Reminds me of the landscapes of Carleton Watkins.

Jackie, Cindy, Diane, Nancy, Cheryl, Christopher, Mitch,

Thanks much for the kind words. They are much appreciated. I really like the toning theme... has me exploring a variety of new processing tools/tricks.

Cheers,

-Michael-

I missed this one until now. Beautiful color toning, it suits the image perfectly and really makes it pop a lot more than straight b & w would have.