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Tritone Your Photographs!

Inle Lake Fishermen - Image Copyright 2003 Tewfic El-Sawy
I occasionally decide that some of my photographs would look better in black and white, but I rarely leave them as B&W and prefer to give them a warm tone. In the above photograph of the fishermen on Inle Lake in Myanmar, I used the following technique in Photoshop (I use Mac but I expect that Windows would be the same) to tritone it:

1. Open your image (RAW or jpg), and make all your normal adjustments in terms of levels, curves, brightness, etc (but do not sharpen yet). Flatten the image.

2. Go to Image>Mode>Greyscale in the menu, which will convert your image into black & white. Then go again to the menu, and choose Image>Mode>Duotone. This will bring up the Duotone options. Under the Type pull-down menu, select Tritone where you will be given the choices of 3 inks to choose from.

3. Select these three types of inks: Black, PANTONE 1205 C and FOCOLTONE 5011. This is done by ticking on each square of the ink samples in the dialog box. Click OK to confirm your three choices.

4. Your image should now be warm toned and probably darker than you’d like. So go to Image>Mode>RGB and switch the mode back to RGB.

5. Open your Levels adjusments and user the sliders to increase the highlights and mid-tones to the levels you feel is right for the image.

6. At this stage, you can sharpen the image and save it.