Split Toning With Gradient Maps

Hi! This is Mama Shan with another tutorial. I am using the image that we used in the toning and burning tutorial and I have my layers file up here. I am just going to show you a couple of more ways that you can play with your image.

We had created the background layer and then we created a Gradient Map Layer and put the levels adjustment layer beneath it to make it a little bit darker and just shut these off and show you what I mean. So we did this first. We picked one of Mama’s New Tritone Gradients which are included in the download of this tutorial. And we added a levels adjustment layer to darken it over all. And then we added a linear burn layer. And right now, the linear burn layer is on top. Let us see what happens if we change the stacking order of the layer.

When you are working in Photoshop, you should experiment with all these variations and even changing the layer order. Once I have put that underneath the gradient map, notice how it blends more with the color.

The object of this tutorial though is we are going to practice some split toning techniques. Now, all we have to do to do a split toning is create another gradient map. And so, I am going to click the new fill adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the layers pallet and choose gradient map. And when this opens up, it is going to place a gradient map layer above our previous one. We are going to click in the picker window, and go to the gradient editor. If you have the new gradients with the purchase download of the previous tutorial, and we can scroll down here and get morning glory. That is what I am going on for here.

These are tritone gradients. So I am going to select morning glory and click okay. And then click dither, and click Okay. Now because this is on top of the previous gradient map, we are seeing that effect. We are to take this and drag it below. We see the other effect and there is a bit of split toning going on. We can see a little bit of a blue and the other colors. Let me put this back up here. This is the morning glory one and show you a way can further split your tones in here. And that is by going into the advance blending options and the blend if slider. So, to do that, you just double click on the layer in a blank spot of the layers slot. Do not double click on the mask or the thumbnail or you will get into other areas.

So just double click on this top layer, and this opens up the layers style dialogue box. And unfortunately, I cannot shrink this down too much but I am going to move it over here. And we will come down here to the Blend. Now, if I take this white triangle here and move it over, it is going to start cutting out those areas of luminosity and show through to the bottom layer and the layer underneath it. To make the transition a little bit smoother, I am going to hold down the Alt Key on the PC or option on the Macintosh and just move that back a little bit so to a little bit smoother tone.

I can also, let me just move the black slider and the Blend If gray area, move that over a little bit and see how that is poking through some of that underlying original gradient map, the ambers here. Now in this instance, we can also use the underlying layer sliders. We do not really need to even go to that bottom layer to play with its sliders. So we can come in here and move black one and option click to split which produces a smoother transition. If you leave it without splitting, it is very posterized looking but you can in effect get some very cool results. I am going to click okay because we do not need to stop there either. We can also play with the opacity of these gradient map layers. Start to bring that down to about 50% and let us see, that brings some of the color in of the underlying layer so we have a little bit of color here. And move that up, it is like that. If we move it down, we are introducing some of the natural color of the image. And so, it is just another means to have fun and play in Photoshop.

Okay, I am going to bring the Layers Pallet back up here and scroll up here and take