Unmesh Dinda 0:00 Hi there, this is Unmesh from PiXimperfect.
And today I'm going to show you how to get hundreds of free duotone, beautiful presets
in Photoshop.
And guess what?
I'm not gonna be the one giving them to you.
Why?
Because you already have them.
Yes, it does come built in.
Now, before we begin, I got a little disclaimer.
This is not the only way to create a duotone effect.
There are lots of other ways of doing it.
But in fact, there are hundreds of ways of doing the same thing in Photoshop.
So without any further ado, let's get started.
Back in the magical world of Photoshop and you want to go ahead and download this photo
and follow along, you know what to do.
Check the links in the description.
First of all, to apply a Duotone effect, you might think 'All right, let's go to Image
- Mode - Duotone.'
But, that's grayed out.
What is the issue?
Duotone will only work if you have a grayscale image or in other words, a black & white image.
But, if we just simply turn this black & white by pressing Ctrl + Shift + U or Command +
Shift + U, this takes away all the colors, this is de-saturation.
And then if we go to Image - Mode - Duotone, it's still grayed out.
Why?
Because it is still built up of R, G and B. Red, green and blue combine together in equal
levels to give you a black & white image.
In other words, if we go to the Color Picker, let me show this to you..If we choose any
of the gray, white or any other color in the black and white range, have a look, R, G,
B, all of them have same values.
But the point is, it still has R, G and B. So, we need to completely change the color
mode.
And the way to do that is simply by going to, let's go back to the original state of
the image, and then go to Image - Mode and Grayscale.
This will completely take away the color information and change the mode from RGB to Grayscale.
So, let's choose that, discard it and done.
Now, when you go to Duotone, it will be applicable.
Go to Image - Mode and then Duotone.
See, it's active now.
It was grayed out before.
Now, when you choose Duotone, something special happens.
Let's choose that.
Have a look.
A Duotone Options dialog box shows up.
What can you do with it?
Now, of course, you can go ahead and choose all the colors.
We can choose, maybe, Quadtone and choose the fourth color manually here.
And you can choose your own colors and you can make the adjustments.
If you click here, you can make the adjustment in these curves and see what kind of changes
they do.
But why go so complex?
There are other ways to do it in an easier way like using Gradient Mask.
The only reason why we want to use this is because of these amazing presets.
If you go here, have a look at the number of presets you have in here - Warm Gray, magenta,
these are really amazing.
Let's choose this one.
I absolutely love that.
And there are some nice Cyan, four color presets, three color presets.
This is a gold mine of Duotone effects.
Alright, so let's try something like Cyan bl 4.
See, that's fantastic too.
Now, if you're a Windows user, I have a good news for you.
I actually have both, Windows and Mac and Mac doesn't have this advantage.
But on a Windows, if you go over the drop down, if you just click over here, choose
any one that you like and after that, you can use the scroll of your mouse, right, so
if you just hover over it, with the scroll of your mouse, you can scroll through different
presets.
Isn't that amazing?
I tried it on Mac, but I couldn't do it.
If somebody is a pro Mac user, maybe you can help me, but I couldn't do it.
But in Windows, it is possible to do.
I think for this one, I'm going to go with bl 165, this one.
Looks really, really nice.
Hit OK.
Looks beautiful, doesn't it?
But there is a problem with it.
Now, let me ask you, I wish this was not a video, but anyway, let me ask you, what is
the problem?
Some of you might say, Alright, so once we have applied the colors, we cannot really
change it again.
Yes, we can.
You can of course go to Image - Mode and then click on Duotone again and you can again change
the color.
So, that is not the problem.
But the problem is, the complete color mode is now changed.
And that's dangerous.
So if I go back to the one that I had chosen before, which was bl 165, let's go back to
that one and hit OK.
And if we go and try to choose any Adjustment layer, so if you click on in here, see, all
of these - Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, all of these are not available now,
because it's a Duotone Color Mode.
And even if you go with something like Curves, see, it has just this Tritone Curve.
What if you want to just play with the colors and play with the RGB curves?
It is not available.
Why?
Because we changed the complete color mode from RGB to Duotone.
So, this is not the apt way to do it.
Even if you wanted to play with these colors and add filters on top of it, we cannot do
it.
So, what is the right way to do it?
Well, the answer is Smart Objects.
Let me illustrate.
Now, here we are back to the original file.
If you want to create a Duotone effect, instead of changing the complete color mode of the
original file, let's do this.
Select the Background layer or your Subject layer and make a copy of that one.
And you know, to make a copy, press Ctrl or Command + J. Now, just name this Duotone or
whatever you want to name it, and then convert this into a Smart Object.
Now, Smart Object acts like a nest and the objects inside it are protected.
And you can open those protected objects in another document.
Does that give you an idea?
Let me show you.
So, once you have that selected, you can go to Filter and then Convert for Smart Filters.
Hit OK.
This converts this into a Smart Object.
You can also right click on the layer, that does the same thing, and then choose Convert
to Smart Object.
It does exactly the same thing.
Now, once we have done that, have a look at this logo right there, it just means that
it is converted into a Smart Object.
Actually, I should say symbol.
Anyway, once that is converted, double click on the thumbnail.
When we do that, the protected file opens in another document.
Now, in this new document, change the Mode.
Go to Image and then Mode and change it to Duotone.
We cannot change it.
First, we need to change it to Grayscale, Discard, Image - Mode - Duotone.
Now select what do you want to select.
For me, I want to go with this one.
Hit OK.
Now, when you save this, the previous original document will update.
You can press Ctrl or Command + S or go to File and then Save.
Now, let's get back to the original document.
Have a look - the Duotone layer.
Isn't that fantastic?
Now you can do anything you want with it.
You can decrease the Opacity, you can just play with Blend Modes.
The possibilities are limitless.
By the way, the tutorial is over now.
You can stop watching it, we have learned the technique.
However, if you want to stick around, I'm going to teach you a special effect.
You want to learn it?
Let's do it.
So all you got to do, first of all, let's increase the Opacity to 100, and then, we
want to add and blend this color with the original one, and there's a special technique
we're going to use to do it.
First of all, let's add this color to the highlights.
And for that, we're going to use a Blend Mode called Multiply.
Now keep in mind, Multiply darkens.
So, let's go ahead and change the Blend Mode of this one to Multiply.
It's looking very nice on the highlights, but, it's crushing the shadows.
So, we don't want it in the shadows.
And how do we do that?
By double clicking on the right side of the layer and take it away from the shadows by
taking the slider of the underlying layer from left to right, just like this.
It's very harsh.
So hold the Alt key or the Option key.
Click on the slider to break it apart and take it all the way to the left and right.
Alright.
Now, we have applied it on the highlights.
But what about the shadows?
Well, we can do that too.
Just make a copy of this one by pressing Ctrl or Command + J. We can actually name this
Multiply.
Now, before we apply to the shadows, we need to clear the Layer Style because we have applied
a Blend If slider here not to target the shadows.
So we need to remove that first.
So, right click on it and you can actually choose Clear Layer Style.
There you go.
It's clear now.
Now, to apply it in the shadows, change the Blend Mode from Normal to Screen, because
Screen brightens.
Now, it's being applied in the shadows, but it's also making the highlights very bright.
So this time we want to do the opposite.
We don't apply it to the highlights.
Again, double click on the right hand side of the layer, this opens up the Layer Style
dialog box and take it away from the highlights by taking the slider of the underlying layer
from right to left, just like this.
Hold the Alt or Option, break it apart.
All right, this is cool.
Hit OK.
Now, let's have a look at the before and after.
So, this is the before, this is the after.
It's kind of too much, but also, at the same time, we are losing a little contrast.
So how do we add some contrast?
First of all, let's name this Screen.
To add some contrast, we going to use one more Blend Mode.
Make a copy of it and we need to clear the Layer Style again.
Right click on it, and choose Clear Layer Style, and this time, we'll choose the Blend
Mode - Soft Light.
Wow.
Now, that's nice.
Now, change the Blend Mode, change the name actually, to Soft Light and this is just for
your reference.
Now make a group of all of these three, select the first one, hold the Shift key, select
the last one of these Adjustments and then press Ctrl or Command + G.
This is now a group and you can name this Duotone Effect and you can decrease the Opacity
if you want to.
This is not exactly Duotone, but we are just inferring or blending the colors from it.
We can reduce the Opacity to about 70%.
and have a look, here's the before, here is the after.
This is looking pretty nice, but it needs some adjustments with Curves.
And that is, again, the advantage of not changing the mode completely, the advantage of Smart
Objects.
All right, let's create a Curves Adjustment layer by clicking on the Adjustment layer
icon and then choose Curves.
Right in here, you can do whatever you want.
So first of all, I see these highlights are very bright, so let's darken it a little bit.
So, on the right hand side I'm going to make a point and just take it down like that.
And we want to add some brightness in the shadows to create a faded effect.
So let's take it up just like this.
Now, that's creating a pretty nice effect.
I'm going to keep it at that.
Now let's play with the colors a little bit in the R, G and B channel.
First of all, we want yellow in the highlights, but there's no Yellow Channel here.
We need to work with blue.
Why?
Because blue is the opposite of yellow.
So, let's go ahead and choose Blue.
If we decrease blues in the highlights, yellows will show up.
So let's take it down, just like this.
See how the yellows show up right now, We're going to take it up in the shadows, just to
create that royal effect.
I like that.
All right, this is nice.
Now let's go and play with the other channels.
So let's say we want to add some magenta and the shadows.
So I'm gonna go to my Green Channel.
Green is the opposite of magenta, RGB opposite of CMY.
Alright, so I'm going to take it.
Wow.
But we want to keep the greens in the highlights.
So create a point and take it up like that.
Now let's play with the Red Channel.
Let's go here.
We want Cyan in the shadows.
So just a touch of cyan and then more red in the highlights.
Wow.
Now that is making a lot of difference.
See?
Isn't it beautiful?
So let me show you the before and after.
Here's the before, here's the after, creating that royal look.
Now, you can create a group of all of this, select the Curves, hold the Ctrl or Command,
select the Duotone Effects group, Ctrl or Command + G.
And the reason why I told you to do this because now you can control the effect of the entire
thing.
So.
I'm going to keep it at about 86%.
And there you have it, a very interesting effect just blending the colors from the Duotone
effect.
Right.
I hope you enjoyed it.
So that's how not to just get access to hundreds of free Duotone presets, but also blend colors
from it using simple techniques like this.
I hope this video helped you.
And by the way, before we end, I forgot to do the recap.
And the recap is this - simply, all we got to do is to copy the layer.
Whatever layer you want to apply the effect to, just copy it and then convert it to a
Smart Object.
Now, open the Smart Object, open the protected items on another document by double clicking
on the thumbnail of that layer, of the Smart Object layer.
And on that new document, simply change the Mode by going to Image and then Mode.
First, change it to Grayscale and only then Duotone will be un-grayed out.
Is that a word?
I'm not sure.
So first change it to Grayscale and then to Duotone.
Those presets will show up.
Choose whatever you want and then come back to the original document after saving it.
It will update automatically.
Now, you can use it in whatever way you want.
If you want all of it, you can keep the Opacity at 100, or if you want a little less of it,
decrease the Opacity and use simple techniques like this to make your image more interesting.
I hope this video helped you and if it did, make sure to give us a like and also don't
forget to subscribe and not just subscribe, ring the bell so that you, my friend, don't
miss any other future tip, trick or tutorial.
I would like to take this moment to thank all these nice and amazing people for supporting
this channel on Patreon and helping keep PiXimperfect free for everybody forever.
Thanks so much for the support.
Thank you for watching.
I'll see you guys in my next one.
Til then, stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai