Beautiful Warmtone and Cooltone Photo Effects Photoshop Tutorial
Back in the day, when one would print their own black
and white prints, you had a choice of a zillion different papers. They
basically boiled down to cooltone and warmtone papers. This combined
with different developers gave one an array of tones to choose from for
any given picture. Sadly, nowadays it’s getting harder to find specific
papers and certain developers are no longer being manufactured. In the
digital era, most people who might not have gone through the trouble of
trying different tones of paper (or even B&W printing for that
matter) will be satisfied with converting a color image to a straight
B&W palette by simply desaturating the color. Today we’re going to
take it a step further. Achieving different tones for specific images
will help you create different moods according to the overall look
you’re going for.
Cooltone Effect
Let’s to start of with a cooltone effect. First thing
we need to do is convert the color image to Black & White by using
the Black & White layer adjustment found at the bottom of your
layers palette. This will bring up the Black and White conversion window
from where you can choose a variety of predefined adjustments that
simulate different photo filters. Choose the filter setting most
suitable for your image. You can also leave it in “Default” and tweak
each color rendition separately. In my case, I used a mix between a high
contrast blue filter to light up the highlights and a red filter to
darken the clouds and shadows by masking out the areas with the
adjustment layer’s mask. Now that we have a Black & White image
we’re ready to cool it down!
Next thing we’re going to do is open up our curves
adjustments window. I’m going to show what your red channel, green
channel and blue channel should look like. Basically what we want to do
is remove some red from the midtones, a little tiny bit of green and
then add some blue. Carefull with the green curve. If you subtract too
much the tone will have a magenta cast, if you subtract too little and
the blue will be more of an aqua tone.
Now, for the effect to look natural what we want to
do is to bring it down a bit. One way to do this is by simple using the
opacity slider for this adjustment layer to say, 50%. Not only that but,
for a more realistic effect, we’re going to mask out some of the
midtones and highlights and leave the shadows with a black blue hue. To
do this, select the layer mask and go to Select > Color Range. There
you can select the tones you want to subtract by simply clicking on the
image with the drop icon. Click on a middle grey and then check the
“invert” checkbox. This way you’ll recover some pure white and the
overall image won’t look so murky blue.
As you are doing this, you can see the same selection
on your layer’s mask as the one in your color range window. All you
have to do is press OK.
If for any reason you want to modify your selection,
simply click on the mask while holding down the CTRL key. Now that you
have your layer’s mask selected you can go to Select > Refine Edge.
In this window you can tweak your selection by using a variety of
sliders to feather and smoothen the edge of your selection.
If you want to check out your layer’s mask on screen,
just press on it while holding down the ALT key. Now you can modify
using your black and white brush any specific area. For more unobtrusive
modification be sure to drop the opacity level on the brush as well as
the hardness of it.
Warmtone Effect
To achieve a warmtone effect we’re going to create a
different curves adjustment. Now, the difference between this effect and
say, a sepia effect is that warmtone B&W paper when not toned in
sepia toners has a natural warmth to it. The midtones have more of an
olive tint to them where as the white is more of a creamy palette. These
papers are especially responsive to toners but have a very interesting
color palette all to themselves. This is what we’re looking to recreate.
Go ahead and turn off the curves adjustment layer
you’ve just created by clicking on the little eye and open a new curves
adjustment layer. This time, recreate the following curves for your red,
green and blue channel:
As you would expect, we’re doing quite the opposite
as before. Instead of adding a whole lot of blues, we’re subtracting
them. Also, we’ll need to take away a little bit of red and green. As
you did previously, go ahead and use color range to select the midtones
in your layer’s mask. In this case, I dropped the opacity to 70%.
That’s pretty much all there is to it. I hope you
found this tutorial helps to add a little style to your B&W images.
You can download the curves adjustments shown in this tutorial Here and Here.
Here’s your before and after pics:
Original Image:
Cooltone Image:
Warmtone Image:
