From the course: Documentary Photo Techniques with Photoshop and After Effects

Adding a sepia-tone or duotone effect with gradient maps

From the course: Documentary Photo Techniques with Photoshop and After Effects

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Adding a sepia-tone or duotone effect with gradient maps

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- If you're looking to create a duo-tone or sepia effect, this is very possible using several different tools inside of Photoshop. Now, there are many different ways of doing this; I'm going to show you two different methods. First we'll start with the gradient map. Now, you'll find this under adjustments, and it's located in the lower-right corner. When you first click, it's going to give you pretty ugly results. The defaults here are often not very good. If you first load it, you may see options like a strong black and white or possibly something as awful as rainbow colors. What you want to do is click on the drop-down menu here, and then click on the gear menu and choose that you want to work with Photographic Toning. I'll click OK to replace these, and you'll find a great collection of different gradient maps, from very subtle ones to stronger colors. Now, if you want to know their names, just click on the gear menu again and choose to see this as a large list. This'll make it easy to browse, and you'll see a wide range of choices. Now, if you find one that you like, it's very simple to use as-is, or you can lower the opacity of that layer to back off the effect. In this case, at a 50% opacity, we get a nice, subtle effect for a gentle sepia tone. Now, I'll take that back up and explore a few other options here. You can use the up and down arrow keys to move through the list, and you'll find a wide range of choices. Some of these are also good at limiting their effects to just a particular tonal range. Remember, these are often a bit strong. Now, I do like this one here, Sepia plus Selenium, and this other one's nice too. And with just a little tweak to the overall layer opacity, we have an effect that seems consistent. What's nice is that you can easily apply this effect to multiple layers to get a consistent tone or color grade to all of your historical images. Often times, rather than dealing with the images being faded and having different color points or tints, I'll simply fix them with the curves adjustment and neutralize the colorcast, and then follow that back up with the gradient map to apply a consistent color effect. Well, this is one way of tinting your images, but let me show you one more.

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