Split Toning Tutorial - The Making of "Dog Tag"

In this tutorial I want to show you how I used split tones to create this picture:




For taking the shot I used a Canon EOS 40D with a Canon 24-105mm 1:4 L IS USM lens, a large softbox, and a small spotlight (same set-up as for "Touch"). The softbox was placed right next to me and raised to about 1.80m above the ground, while the small spotlight was placed about 50cm above the ground and used to brighten up parts of the black background, thus making it dark gray. You can see the exact arrangement here:



I used the following settings:

• RAW mode
• Focal length: 40mm
• Aperture: f/7.1
• Shutter speed: 1/250s
• ISO: 100
• White balance: 5900K

And this is the photo I took (by the way, the models are Andrea and Tara from J.I.M. Modelling Agency, Bangkok):




The best thing about this technique is that it's extremely fast and easy. The first step is double-clicking on the original raw file. By default, the Photoshop component "Camera Raw" will open the image and you'll see this screen:



The first tab, which is selected by default when you open Camera Raw, is "Basic". I changed the settings as follows:

• Tint: -1
• Brightness: +50
• Contrast: +25

The next one is "Tone Curve":



In "paramteric" mode, I boosted the contrast with these settings:

• Highlights: +43
• Lights: +10
• Darks: -24
• Shadows: -57

In the "Detail" tab I changed the sharpening settings as follows:

• Amount: +47 (all the other settings are default settings)
  

The next step is the actual split-toning process. I selected the "Split Toning" tab and chose a green hue for the highlights and a blue hue for the shadows. All I had to do was changing the parameters to these:



Highlights:

• Hue: 101
• Saturation: 58

Shadows:

• Hue: 219
• Saturation: 35

That's it! This is how the photo looked after processing it with Camera Raw:



The only thing I did afterward was removing the noise, smoothing the skin, and increasing the sharpness and contrast a little. All of this can be done in just one step using the Photoshop plug-in NoiseNinja. I case you don't have it yet I strongly recommend you get this plug-in because it will significantly increase the quality of your images.

After all these steps, my picture looks like this now:



Much better than the original, don't you think? ;)

Psst... check out another way of processing this image: http://www.glossyart.com/blog/2008/08/making-of-touch.html