toning tutorial
I first experimented with this toning technique on a shot of a beech tree from Castlehead Wood, near Keswick and have since used it on a number of shots. It's a simple procedure that I've been asked about a lot over the last couple of years so I thought it'd be a good technique to kick off my new tutorials section.
In this tutorial, we're going to give an image the same toning treatment as Castlehead Wood so you can see step by step how to create it. In a nutshell, we'll tone the saturated parts of the image but leave the unsaturated parts grey. On the right shot though this can blend some of the strengths of both colour and black and white into one shot, creating a best of both worlds by removing full colour but leaving the contrast that comes from variation in saturation. I'll show the technique in Photoshop CS2 initially but I'll cover Gimp equivalents at the end too.
Here's the image we're going to tone (it's of Ullswater, taken from Silver Point). The important thing to note at this point is the difference in saturation across the image. There are some vivid green and yellows in the grass, more subtle blues in the sky and lake, and almost pure grey rocks and clouds. The actual colour (hue) of these elements isn't important but their saturation is what counts.
