Hello, I'm Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can create a sort of faux HDR Split Tone
effect in Lightroom.
Before we get started with this tutorial let's have a look and see what it is that we're
trying to achieve.
Here is my image and it's sort of a split tone slightly colored image.
What I've done is I've added the color back into the highlight areas of the image.
But basically it's a black and white split tone and a black and white effect has been
given a sort of HDR effect so it's very gritty as well.
Let's have a look and see how the image was when we began.
This is just the original image and this is the image that we're seeking to create.
So to do that I'm going back.
I've actually created a virtual copy of the original image so that we can work on this.
I'm going to the Basic panel and the first thing I'm going to do is to create this sort
of faux HDR look.
And you can do that very easily just once I upgrade this to the latest process version.
You can do it by increasing the contrast in the image.
I'm going to take it up to around about 50.
Then I'm going to bring highlights down and I'm going to bring whites all the way down
so I'm taking the top ends of the Histogram and bringing them as far across to the left
as I can.
And then I'm going to take shadows and blacks all the way to the right.
What that's done is to flatten the contrast in the image a little bit but we'll get that
back by dragging clarity all the way to the right.
And we'll add a bit of vibrance.
Well we'll add quite a lot of vibrance.
I'm going to add plus 70 ish in vibrance.
And we'll finish off with a strong contrast tone curve.
And if that's not strong enough then you can drag up here and down on this end to get it
even stronger.
What I want is some definite lights and darks in this image so that I can then apply my
color to a little bit later on.
So right now we have a sort of faux HDR effect.
The next step is to remove the color from it so I'm going to click here and turn the
image into a black and white.
Having done that we can then add a Split Tone effect.
Split tone adds one color to the highlights and one to the shadows.
If you just drag on the slider you won't get to see what color you're adding so hold the
Alt or Option key as you drag.
I'm in the highlight area right now and I want to add a sort of warm yellow to the highlights
in this image.
I think that's a good tone there.
And then into the shadows I'm going to add a sort of aqua blue and I can just work until
I find the right color here.
I think that will be pretty good.
And I'll adjust the saturation of both these colors up and then the balance between lights
and darks.
Now because I'm going to replace some of the light areas with the color in the image I
could actually take this a little bit further up because I'm going to get this color back
in a minute.
So now we have a faux HDR effect that's been converted to black and white and we've added
a split tone adjustment to it.
It's time now to get some color back in the image.
To do this I'm going to click here on the Color tab and that brings all the color back
into the image.
Now we can selectively remove it.
I'm going here into the Adjustment brush and I'm going to adjust my brush size to be really
big, no feather, 100 percent flow, no masking.
I'm going to click on the image here to anchor the Adjustment brush and now I'm just going
to drag over to apply that adjustment to the entire image.
If I show the selected the mask overlay you'll see that the entire image is covered with
this mask overlay and because I have saturation set to minus 100 we've removed all the color
that we just put back into the image.
This is it at zero, this is it at minus 100.
Now I'm going to tap on the Eraser here because what I want to do is to erase some of this
effect.
I want a small brush size but a reasonably large feather relative to the brush size.
So I'm just going to adjust that.
I don't want full flow so I'm just going to adjust the flow down and I don't want auto
mask.
Now if I drag on the image, I'm going to make sure that I've got my Pen selected here, I
do have my Pen selected, if I paint on the image I'm going to be bringing back the underlying
color in that color image.
And now with my Adjustment brush Pen selected I can go and brush with this eraser over the
areas of the image that I want to bring back just a hint of the underlying color from.
So I'm going to brush over my bicycle rider here.
I know that there is some really interesting color in this pavement here so I'll bring
that back in as well.
And then I'm just going to tip into the highlight areas of the image and just try and bring
back just the tiniest highlight of color.
And because this brush is a low flow brush we're not getting all that effect back in
just one brush but we can brush over it a few times if we find some interesting color
that we want to bring back into the image.
So effectively you can choose at this point which of the colors underlying from the image
that you want to bring back in and what sort of detail you want to see.
I'm just trying to pick out the obvious highlight areas and I know this building was a really
gorgeous pink.
I know this building has practically no color so just a little bit of color might be interesting
here.
But you can work on the image to bring back just those areas of color that you want to
bring back into the image.
We know that this bicycle rider has a really great red hat so we may want to see that.
So this is a way of applying a faux HDR effect to an image, converting it into black and
white, reducing the saturation using an Adjustment brush and then just bringing back a little
bit of the color into the underlying image.
Of course we could bring back as much color as we want by just adjusting the saturation
slider.
But we're sort of opting for nearly a minus 100 in saturation and then just bringing it
back by erasing the effect of this Adjustment brush.
You can see here that the Adjustment brush has been erased in these areas to bring back
some of the underlying color into the image.
I'm Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator and other photo editing tutorials on this
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