Adobe Camera RAW Adjustment Video Tutorial – Split Toning
Posted by Wilk | Filed under Adobe Camera RAW tutes
The Split Toning tab is likely going to be your least used adjustment in Adobe Camera RAW even if you’re an expert at it, which I am admittedly not. The Split Toning tab deals with your photo by essentially splitting the tone range in half, right down the middle of the histogram as it were, allowing you to tone and saturate each half separately.
As you can see by the image of the split toning adjustment tab to the right, split toning offers the ability to adjust hue on the highlights and the shadows separately. In a color photo that you want to keep within the realm of "normal" these sliders would need to be used with great caution, as you would quickly find out as you work with this adjustment tab. Saturation would probably be the main thing you do with this, and could be useful in a photo where you have a dark color for example that was too saturate. Removing some of the saturation in the shadows might help that. The Hue slider radically changes the appearance of the colors just as it does with the Hue/Saturation adjustment in Photoshop.
Of note, as I said earlier, the "split" in split toning is right down the middle of the tone distribution of your photo, but that can be adjusted by the Balance slider in between shadow and highlights. So for example, if you wanted to change saturation or shift hue on just the darkest shadows, you would move the slider to the left a fair amount then make your adjustments on just that portion and on the Shadows only.
The basic way this works is, you use the saturation slider on either the shadows or highlights or both to introduce a hue shift into the photo. The higher you set the saturation, the stronger the hue change is introduced into the photograph. The Balance slider shifts the degree to which either the shadow or highlight hue shift affect the photograph.
As described by Adobe, the main application for this dialog box is reintroducing some color back into a shot that you’ve converted to grayscale using the HSL Grayscale conversion. Once the photo is converted to black and white on those tabs, you can reintroduce color here differently according to whether it’s in the highlight or shadow range. Therefore you can introduce one color for the shadows and one for the highlights, and dictate each color by the hue sliders. In printing, this would be called a duotone or tritone photo. There is a more effective method for doing duotones in photoshop for example, because you can actually use a Pantone color as the second color in the duotone, thus allowing the prepress workflow to pick up on that PMS/Black split and those colors would come out on 2 color plates correctly. Split toning done here would have to be run in 4 color on the press as there is no Pantone declairation.
This tab can be also used for creative/artistic changes in your photo that are more artistic or extreme as it were, that would require experimentation on your part, you will get no guidelines on artistic interpretation from me, I would say just go ahead and play with the idea if/when you get time.
Tags: adobe camera raw, nondestructive, post processing, video tutorial
