SPL IT OPINION I have some images that were splittoned. Can you explain how and why you’d want to do this?

You’d certainly be doing it for pure creative reasons, John. It’s a technique that’s been around since we had to do all the post-production stuff in a darkroom, and I recall messing

1 about pretty unsuccessfully with attempts to split-tone blackand-white images in chemicals.

These days the whole process of split-toning an image is a lot easier and cheaper. I know I wasted endless sheets of expensive photo paper back in the day, but on the computer you can make as many attempts as you like to get it right.

Basically, when we split-tone a black-and-white image, we are toning the highlights one colour and the shadows another. It tends to be most effective when you use opposite colours. When you split-tone an image, it will give you a different twist to the straight monochrome shot, and you might want to do it to enhance the mood of a scene.

I find the best way of doing it is to work with a raw file in Camera Raw because the Split Toning function there is easy-to-use and very effective. You’ll see the quick step-by-step below, but essentially you take the image you want to split-tone and remove the colour, then you move into the Split Toning function and play around with the sliders until you get a look that you like.

Not all black-and-white images will work when they are split-toned, so you should try lots of different images to get a feel for what generally works and what doesn’t.