Photo Answers

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Split success

Q I saw some amazing landscape images recently, and the photographer told me they were split-toned. What does that mean? Mary Lane

A

Split-toning is a technique that’s really easy to do in the postprocessing of a raw file, because both Lightroom and Camera Raw have a Split Tone panel you can play with. Essentially split-toning is a type of colour grading that gives a different look to your photograph; it can be used with both colour and black-andwhite images. It’s called split-toning simply because you can colour-tone the highlights separately to the shadows.

A visual explanation is probably the easiest approach; here are four different split-tone treatments. In the first image, the highlights are boosted by orange and the shadows by blue so that we have a crossprocess look. In this case, it doesn’t really suit the scene. In the second image, the reverse – orange shadows with blue highlights – has been used, and the result is better for this landscape. In the third treatment, the highlights are yellow and the shadows are orange, to create a really warm colour grading across the whole scene. The fourth image has first been turned to black-and-white before both orange shadows and highlights were applied, for a sepia appearance.

There are no rights and wrongs with split-toning: it’s down to personal preference and what you want the effect to achieve. You can increase saturation on both colour channels – I find around +20 to +30 often works best – and shift the balance to give more emphasis to toning in the shadows, or vice versa. Find an image you think might benefit from this technique, and have a play.