This little guide is about Split Toning and how to achieve this effect with Adobe Camera Raw, part of Photoshop CS5 (but earlier versions should work about the same).  The basic idea is to give an image a different tint for the shadows and the highlights.

split toning effect (click to enlarge)

So this weekend I spent some time taking pictures of my cats, I forced myself to use my little 14mm pancake lens for that, I just love this lens. Turns out using a wideangle lens for cats has one drawback – all the distracting shapes and colours in the background are very visible. Unlike normal or telephoto lenses which nicely blur everything in the background and show a much smaller portion of it, with wideangle you get much more clutter in your pictures.

But I found that split toning helps to draw attention away from the distracting backgrounds. The picture I’m using here as an example doesn’t actually suffer from that much clutter but the tree still has enough detail to be distracting. And the colours are quite dull, no warm sunlight, the whole picture looks pretty uninteresting.

original photo

Making the photo greyscale is already a big improvement but that’s a little boring, right? I like black and white photography too but I wanted to do something a bit more creative than that with this picture.

greyscale

So I’ll give you a very short step by step guide for split toning. It’s easiest if you shoot raw instead of jpg (which you should always do anyway)*. And I use Photoshop CS5. If I remember right the previous version(s) had the same functionality but not 100% sure if it’s exactly the same, but you’ll figure it out I’m sure.

Step by step

1. drag your raw photo into Photoshop and the camera raw dialog will appear (see bottom of this post for the extra steps if you can’t shoot in raw format)

2. do whatever exposure/recovery/fill light/blacks etc adjustments you need to do on the Basic tab page to make sure it doesn’t look over or underexposed

3. go to the HSL/Grayscale tab and turn on Convert to Grayscale (feel free to do this before step 2)

4. now go to the Split Toning tab and just copy these settings:

You can tweak the Balance slider to get more of the blue or yellow showing, the right “mixture” changes depending on the overall brightness of your image. Other colour combinations are possible too, but I find yellow highlights and blue shadows very nice for giving the impression of warm light, especially if your original photo didn’t actually have any warm light like in my example.

And that’s it!

Another little tip:

For some photos this adds an interesting tint even if you don’t convert it to greyscale. It really depends on the photo how much of the original colour you want to keep. Just use the Vibrance/Saturation sliders on the Basic tab page to have more or less of the original colours showing.

before and after - split toning on top of original colours

This one actually looks good with original colours and the split toning effect applied on top (and some splotches removed). This effect works very well for architecture and landscapes too. Now to dig out some of my older raw files to see if I can do something with all those photos I discarded for looking too dull…

*If you can’t shoot in raw format, you can still use the camera raw dialog to edit your images. Open Adobe Bridge, browse to your jpgs (or tiffs, other image formats might work as well), select the image you want to edit and go to File > Open in Camera Raw. Then you can apply all the same effects and settings as you would with raw images (the difference is that raw images contain more data like extra dynamic range for example which results in less quality loss if you process them).