Did you know that in Lightroom there's a simple way to add punch to your photos,
adding some color to different areas of your photos. There's independent of white
balance and your normal tonality changes and it's really simple to understand and
easy to apply. It's called split toning. It's a lot easier to show you what this
is than to try to explain everything all at once so let's just take a look at a
picture here. This is a photo that I shot in Panama. It looks pretty good. I have
already done all of my white balance adjustments, all my tonality changes but what
I want to do is I'm going to flavor this image. I want to add a little bit more
flavor to the highlight area, I want to add some color to that and a different
color to the shadow area and so look as the subtle change so here's before. Look
at the clouds, look at the darkness in the water when I go to the after photo.
Now you can see there's more magenta in this, there's more blue in the shadow area. That's
from the subtle change. Some people might think it's actually a little bit too
much for this image, but let me explain this in terms that are a little bit
easier to understand. So what split toning is, it allows you to say 'hey, I
want to take a color, any color in the spectrum and I want to inject that color
into the highlights of my image or when I take a color, any color, I want to
take that color and inject that into the shadows of my image or you can do both
at the same time. That's the split tone. So maybe we'll have some ambers or oranges
in the highlights and blues in the shadows and we can flavor our image that
way, either subtly or really dramatically. Let me show you exactly how
this works and then we'll get to how you apply it to a realistic image. This is a
photo that I shot somewhere in Paris. It's just a glass ceiling here and the reason
I chose this image is because we have this highlight area here, these windows
and then we have a lot of shadows over here on the other side so what I'll do here to show
you how split toning works is I'm going to go to the develop module and then over
to split toning. Now notice in split toning we really
have five sliders. We have a section for the highlights, we can choose the hue, in
other words which color we want to apply, and the saturation. How much of that
color we want to apply and the same thing for the shadows. The hue, in other
words which color do we want to throw into the shadows and then how much of
that color we want to throw into the shadows and then we have this other slider
here called balance, that I'll explain later.
Now when you first start out if you're going through this and sliding these
sliders back and forth, you'll see that nothing is happening.
I go through the hue because my saturation is set to 0 so to see what's
happening you need to take that saturation and increase that. I'll go all
the way to 100% so we can see. Now as I move my highlights around you can see
that whatever color I choose, whatever hue is being injected into my highlights.
There's another way to choose the color, by the way, and that's just to click on that
little square there and then you can use your color picker to choose the hue
and the saturation all at one time.
So notice this is in my highlights I'm going to choose bright red here, so that
we have something that's really noticeable and in the shadows here I'm
going to go and choose a really deep blue and now notice we have our shadows,
have this deep blue are highlights have this red i can take that shadow
saturation down, bring it up. The same thing with the highlights. This is'nt really
practical, it's just sort of helping us understand the principles of split
toning. What does the balance slider do? Well the balance slider helps us
understand how much of the image is considered in our highlights and how
much is in our shadow. So right now it's saying in the middle at zero the balance is
equal, so what's normally considered a shadow is a shadow. What's normally
considered a highlight is a highlight, but as we shift that balance over
we're saying; "hey take more, expand those highlights, to put more of that color
there, or expand the shadows, so we're expanding one or the other." So we can see
that down here, if I'll slide this balance lighter to the right I'm saying
hey take and allow more
the image to be considered a highlight and you can see our red is growing our
highlights are growing or to the left consider more of the image to be a
shadow and see that the blue is expanding. So you can sort of play with
the balance between those highlights and shadows and remember you don't have to
do both at the same time if I just want my highlights to be highlighted with red
I can just take the saturation on the shadows down and it's only the highlights
that we're seeing there and we can still play with that. Ok now that's the
principle. What does this actually do in a real photo? Something that
we might want to do. Well I'm going to open up an image here. This is a shot
that I took in Nepal and that the color looks great everything looks pretty good
with this, but notice that in our highlights here in the clouds
we've got this golden sun peeking through right here in this area, but the
rest of the highlights
they're just sort of neutral color. They're just normal clouds. What I'd like
to do is say; "hey you know, I just want those to be a little bit warmer. I want my
highlights to have a tone that matches that same section". So I'll go down here
to the highlights. Click on this. I'm going to choose something that's a
little bit yellowish, something like that and then I can play with that to get the
exact tone that I want. Notice now I'm having the highlights match that area so
I'm not changing the color temperature, I'm not doing anything to that foreground
all that green. I'm just saying; "hey in the highlights,
let's inject a little bit more of that golden color to match that sun coming
through and then I can play with that saturation to make it a little bit more
subtle or dramatic,
however I want to do that." So that's one way that you can just use that for scene
photography
let's go to a different image here and I'm going to grab this image that I shot
here in Panama and again this looks pretty darn good,
but what I want to do is, I want to add some tones to this. I want to take these
foreground, these dark areas and make them a little bit more magenta bluish and then
take these clouds and make them look a little bit more golden. So in my
highlights here I've chosen a more golden highlights. You see as I'm
warming that up the whole sky everything that's a highlight becomes more golden
and then I've chosen down here a little bit more of a bluish and then I'll bring
that into the shadows and that adds a little bit of a magenta there and so you
can see I'll turn that off.
That's before, it looks pretty good. After now that's got some more golden color
you can see the highlights over here look a little bit more golden, up here it looks a
little bit more golden so I can tone that image in a way that looks a little
bit more pleasing to me either suddenly or dramatically. It doesn't matter. Now we
can also do things. Let's take a monochromatic looking image. Here's one
that was in a recent episode of Exploring Photography. This is the shot I
did with my long lens of the Andes Mountains. So what I want to do is I'm
going to take this and give it a little bit more flavor, so these highlights here
I'm going to add in again, a little bit more amber. So I'm going to go over here to bring in some
amber. That looks pretty good and I want my shadows to be a complementary color
so I'm going to bring in some blues, so I'm going to just add that right there,
so move that over. There we go and you can play with that, until you get that to
look exactly as you want.
Now one thing that's very important to understand is that this layer, sort of
like a layer, not an actual layer, but it's sort of a layer that's floating
above all of the colors and white balance and everything you've done
underneath to your image, and so the hue, the saturation slider, all those sliders
that you normally work with colors don't affect this split tone that you're
adding. Let me just show you that. I'm going to go up here on the same exact image,
I'm going to grab my presence here and take the saturation down to zero and notice I
still have that bluish tone to my shadows. If I take the saturation all the
way up, I still have the bluish tone in my shadows and so the underlying image is
getting more or less saturated but the stuff that I've done on top with my
split tone stays the same. It's not affected by this. Even if I go and change
that to a black and white, I still have my split tone. That's working and so that
is something that's really important to understand. The split tone is independent
of those saturation
and the other sliders in the presence area. So you're vibrance and saturation
your clarity etc they are independent of that and that's really, really cool. So if
you really want to do a quick change to the highlights, maybe give them a little
bit more of a warm tone, or a cool tone, or the same thing the shadows you can do
that, without affecting everything else and that's one of the advantages of this.
The other thing you can do; one more image.
Here's an image that I shot in Paris. It's the famous Moulin Rouge, it looks
pretty good, but it's totally red. There's a lot of red to this. I want some
complementary colors. So what I can do and this is the color temperature that I
want but I want to make this a little bit more punchy. So I'm going to go my
shadows here and I'm going to add in a bunch of green. I'm going all the way to
a 100% and notice that brings out all this stuff underneath the sign,
underneath the Moulin Rouge sign but I want my highlights also to have a little bit
more punch as well, so I'm going to add in some amber. Now notice here is 'before'
looks ok, 'after' now we have much punchier, more contrasting color scheme so
we've got our greens and our reds, that are contrasting and that really makes this a
much more interesting photo to look at. So you set your tonalities, set your
white balance, you get everything set and then you add this extra layer of split toning
to add something either to the shadows or the highlights or both at the same time
and I think you'll see that you get some really interesting effects.
The other thing you can do with this filter here is you can make things look
a little bit 'instagrammy'. So we have this dog here I shot I think in Baños
Ecuador and what I want to do is I want to take the the dark areas here make
them really blue, so I'll do that. Take the white, the highlights make them a
little bit more orange and so there you go. Now you have something that looks a
little 'Instagrammy'. If you want to change up what's happening, again you can
use the the balance to change that or if you want to change your highlights and
shadows, then you can just do that in your develop module and that will also
allow you to do some really cool things so you can get some of those
'instagrammy' kind of looks.
It's split toning, it's really easy to use,
it's really fun, play with it. Try to do some things that are really dramatic.
Try to do some things that are very subtle and I think you'll see that
cityscape, scenic photos, all those kinds of things can really have some flavor
that you can't just get by adjusting the white balance and using different
filters and things like that. So check it out.
Split toning, it can really help your photography quite a bit.
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don't miss a single episode.
Thanks for joining me and I'll see you again, next time.