Creative Print Styles with Photoshop

Adapted from Printing with Adobe Photoshop CS4 (Focal Press)
By Tim Daly
Dateline: August 12, 2009
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Toning

Historically, photographic print toning has used chemical toners like sepia and selenium to make prints with fairly limited colors ranging from brown to purple-reds. With the digital process, however, there are many more color options available together with a near Zone System level of control. For the fainthearted, this digital route is also reversible, so there’s no danger of ruining your perfectly good image file. Subtlety, if you want it, is there in bundles, with no need to produce intimidating Colorvir-like prints, unless hallucinogenic effects are your thing. Digital coloring in CS4 means you can have infinite control over the toning process adding color across the whole image or dropping it in up to ten different tonal sectors. Following is a number of different routes to image toning, starting with the easiest and ending with the more interesting Duotone techniques.

Starting Points

Unlike the darkroom process, you can begin with three different types of image modes, Grayscale, RGB, or CMYK, but you must convert to a desaturated RGB image before you start. If you have a full color image, such as a scan from a color tranny and want to apply an all-over digital tone effect, like selenium, drain the color away by Image > Adjust > Desaturate. This is useful, because the result stays in the RGB color mode.

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