Applying tones to your black and white photos

The art of black and white photography extends beyond shades of grey. The very word monochrome means ‘one tone’, it just doesn’t say which one. Adding a coloured tone is a long-established darkroom technique for finishing the photograph and making it express other qualities and meanings.

In the digital environment, toning no longer involves often-unpleasant quick-fix solutions, and experimentation no longer carries the risk of ruining your work. With Photoshop, your toning panel has no limits.

Some photographers have a strong preference for tones such as sepia and blues that are familiar from the darkroom. But there is much more to such traditional tones than stubborn conservatism. Blues can convey coldness, while sepias can denote warmth and romance.
A subtle brown might mimic a darkroom technique, such as the cyanotype, or the tone may suggest a period of history. A purplish brown or sepia suits 19th-century themes, yet can look wrong for times before the invention of photography, which we see more through black-and-white lithographs.
Non-traditional tones, reds and greens, or primary colours can move the photograph into the realm of graphic art.

Two simple toning methods

The simplest way to add a tone is by adding a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to your black-and-white picture. Check Colorize, and then adjust the Hue and Saturation sliders.

Here the Hue has been dragged into the cyan-blue range and then the tone cut back by dragging the Saturation slider to the left.
Using Photoshop’s Black and White adjustment layer is another quick way to add a tone. Check the Tint check-box at the top of the dialog menu and click the square next to it to bring up the Color Picker. From there you can select the tone you want.

More advancing toning techniques

For more advanced work, it’s generally better to separate the adjustment layers you use for the black-and-white conversion from the one that adds the tone. Here, for instance, two Black and White adjustment layers were used. The Blue Filter preset rendered more detail from the yellowish water—blue being yellow’s opposite—while the Green Filter preset revealed more tones in the foliage. Using masks would have meant needing to repeat the toning on each layer.

Using Curves for toning offers the most flexibility and is, therefore, the preferred method for lots of photographers. It’s important to set the Curves adjustment layer’s blending mode to Color so it targets the image’s colour and doesn’t change its contrast and brightness.

Using the Channel drop-down box, drag the Red, Green, and Blue curves separately. Make the tone more red by dragging the red curve upward, and less red by dragging it downward, and adjust the other curves in the same way. Here, the particular combination of more red and less blue has produced a cold sepia or brown tone.

Advanced Digital Black & White Photography is John Beardsworth’s complete exploration of photography’s most enduring look. Popular amongst photographers for its rich tradition and unique graphic qualities, digital black-and-white photography has much more to it than simply throwing away the color in Photoshop. Taking full advantage of the latest features in Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and Silver Efex Pro, the revised and updated edition of Advanced Digital Black & White Photography works at the frontier of black-and-white photography and digital imaging. You will discover the most creative ways to convert your pictures to black and white, how to fine-tune your monochrome images, and how to emphasize your subjects’ qualities. With both quick solutions to common problems and flexible, non-destructive methods for finer control, this book will enable you to produce the finest, most expressive black-and-white interpretations of your vision.

Advanced Digital Black & White Photography
John Beardsworth
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RRP for print edition: £17.99