Split Toning in Lightroom and Camera RAW 4 (CS3)

Split toning is an effect that you can add to your photographs to achieve different looks that range from subtle to over-the-top. It is a classic darkroom technique with a long history that takes years of trial-and-error to master. Luckily for us, instant gratification in the way of real-time updating sliders is afforded to us by the new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS3's Camera RAW 4 (ACR).

As with many of the new RAW conversion capabilities, both programs share the exact same functionality in the case of split toning. In Lightroom you'll find the options inside the Develop Module while ACR 4 has it's options in the (tragically nondescript) tab called "S".

The concept behind a split tone is a relatively simple one: tint the highlight pixels with one shade and the shadow values with a different shade. Ah, but which shades you ask? That's the magic of the sliders: you get to try on as many different variations as you'd like before you are committed to any particular mix. While typically applied to grayscale images, split toning can also be used to good effect on certain color images - especially those which by their nature border on a monochromatic tone set. Today we will only consider grayscale images and leave color photographs to the reader's curiosity to explore.

Let's take a look at an image.

Tree in Snow
click for larger view

I took this photograph as a part of my 2007 Frozen Cincinnati outing during our winter storm of the year. A nice picture that certainly lends itself to black an white, but it had something missing when it was simply gray tones. The introduction of some simple warm and cool tones enhances the image in several ways, at least to my taste. The cool shadows evoke the cold of winter while the warm tones in the sky give a feeling of age that plays off of the old tree.

For this scene I've used Camera RAW to add the split tone effect after I completed the conversion to black and white (which was also done in ACR). As you can see in the screen shot below, I've set my highlights to a warm brown tone (Hue 45) and the shadows to a cool blue (Hue 220). I've left the saturation pretty low at 25 as I wanted a more subtle effect.

The Photoshop CS3 Camera RAW dialog with the Split Toning tab selected

The last thing you'll notice is that I've adjusted the "Balance" slider a bit to the left. Balance is used to control the amount of tones which are considered to be affected by either the Highlights or Shadows slider. In this case I wanted there to be more cool tones than what I got with the slider at 50%, so I adjusted the Balance to the left. This put more bias toward the shadow tones which means more pixels would be considered shadows (and therefore tinted cool blue) than highlights.

Now let's do the same thing in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom instead of ACR. This time we'll use a portrait, but similar split tonalities that are somewhat more intensely saturated:

The Photoshop Lightroom dialog in the Develop Module

Here the split tone effect provides some visual interest by tying the eye makeup into the design on the background via similar tonality. The warmer skin on the key side versus the slightly cool skin on the shadow side of the model adds depth to the story (which is for the viewer to interpret). A split tone can work well in a fashion setting due to the way that different color choices can influence the viewer's feelings much in the same way as a movie soundtrack can change the mood from mystery and murder to flowers and kittens.

Notice that the controls for setting the Split Tone options are identical, although the interface is a bit prettier. All of the sliders work the same way, and in addition you have the benefit of the little "on-off switch" to the left of the words "Split Toning". That switch will toggle the effect on and off, allowing you to see the extent of your changes. In the case of this particular image we'll likely be working it in Photoshop prior to any real use; Lightroom's split tones are still useful to us as a quick preview of what we'll have to work with in PS without having to awaken the beast.

For this image the saturation is quite a bit stronger and the balance is different, but the concept and the controls all work the same as they did in ACR. Note that the Lightroom Help Text has stated the usage of the Balance Slider inaccurately:

Set the Balance slider to balance the effect between the Highlight and Shadow sliders. Positive values increase the effect of the Shadow sliders; negative values increase the effect of the Highlight sliders.

Unless I've completely misread that I would say that precisely the opposite behavior is in effect - it certainly looks to me like negative values decrease the effect of the highlight sliders... hey - it's a 1.0 release in a heated race against Apple's Aperture, so I suppose we'll let Adobe slide.

For a long while, the best way to create a split tone effect was in Photoshop proper, using one or more Hue Saturation adjustment layers set to Colorize. Combined with the sophisticated masking capabilities and layer blends it's still going to be the tool of choice when a global adjustment doesn't fit the bill. For a great discussion on this technique, I'll refer you to the excellent retouching book Skin by Lee Varis.

That said, a lot of images will be just fine with a global change and for that Lightroom and ACR 4 are great tools. Have fun!