Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to create the Spotify Duotone effect in adobe Photoshop

Daniel Walter Scott

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Welcome to this video about Duotone effects. It's really easy to do, it's the layer that goes over the top of any image. Converts it into this cool two spot colored look. You have to do the whole thing, you can do 50:50, you can move it around. It's loads of fun, it's easy to do, let's get started. 
Let's open up the images, 'File', 'Open'. In your 'Exercise Files' there's a new folder called '11'. I'm going to open up 'DuoTone 01' and 'DuoTone 02'. Now you can do this with any image, but it does come out nicer if there's a clear contrast between your subject matter and the background. So you might have to do some masking or some sort of way to kind of dull the background. Like this one here is being dodged in the background so there's really strong difference between the model here and the background. It's really easy to do. With the layer selected, go to 'Adjustments Panel'. You're looking for this one here called Gradient Map. It's the last one on the last row, give him a click. Instantly that's working, just the wrong colors, that's all. So click anywhere in this colored bar here. You double click this house and this house to change the colors. You can start with one of the default ones up here. This one here is particularly good. It's almost kind of knocked out that Spotify look that we're doing for a long time. There's some terrible ones in here as well. Let's click on this first one. 
I'm going to leave the purple because I like it, I'm going to double click the orange and move to that more Spotify color. Just drag the Hue Slider up and down to find where you want it to go. Maybe I want it to be kind of minty green. That's going to work for me. Now in this side here, I feel like it was a little bit more on the purples. Let's click 'OK'. Now if you're finding you got the wrong colors you can just come out of that color. So if you're like, "Oh, got the wrong way around" you can click 'OK' and just click 'Reverse'. Just kind of switches those two colors out. Let's go a little bit further. 
So let's open up 'DuoTone 02'; thank you, Anthony. The first one was Drew Graham. This one here, I'm going to do the exact same thing. So we're going to go down to 'Adjustments', and get over here. Pick our colors, click in here. It looks pretty cool already. What I'm going to do though is I'm going to use some more specific colors. I'm going to use, remember this from earlier? 'Window', 'Extensions', 'Adobe Color Themes'. If your internet's not super slow this thing all load up. You want to click 'Explore'. Then I'm just going to work with kind of most popular colors. 
What I'm going to do? I like this one here, fine, click on the dotted lines. I'm going to say 'Add to Swatches'. It just means that now-- close down the libraries if they open up, but if you go to 'Window', and go to Swatches', you'll see this, little color box up here. I'm going to close that down. Now when I go into my Gradient Map, I can click on this white house. Actually double click on the white house then I can just come up here and pick one of these colors. So those are the colors that came through from Adobe Color Themes. I'm liking that one. I'm going to double click this one. Now I'm just going to cycle through what I want it to be. Pick that one. So that's how to pick specific colors. 
A couple other things you can do to enhance your Duo Toneness is to grab this midpoint. It just decides what becomes what color. So you might find that your image is-- let's click on this guy, there is a midpoint here. Just needs a bit of sliding left and right to get the right colors in the right place. Now what you would have noticed there is, I got little bit lost. If you click anywhere but there it adds another Swatch, and you can go for a third color, go for a tri color. It might be-- I double click this one, I'm going to go and pick that one there. I made mine horrible, you too can make yours horrible. If you want to get rid of colors, say you just got lost, and you're like me, you clicked on it by accident, now those colors are everywhere. Click, hold, and just drag them off into no-man's land. 
So I'm clicking, holding, and dragging off, and they disappear. Let's go a little bit further. Let's click 'OK'. Duo Tones can look quite cool if they're kind of like, maybe half and half. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my Rectangle Tool and just draw a box kind of halfway down there. So it is the Rectangle Marquee Tool. What I'm going to do is, you can see, my Gradient Map over here, it's an Adjustment Layer, and by default it gets given a Layer Mask but the Layer Mask isn't doing anything because it's completely white. What we can do is, we can right click it and say delete that Layer Mask. Just like we did for any other, remember, we did selections in the last one with our boat and our island with that selection here, with our layer selected I can click 'Layer Mask'. 
I can do just half of it so the black stuff gets hidden and the white stuff shows through. It doesn't have to be straight up and down, you can do a selection with the Polygonal Lasso Tool, so I'm going to undo and I'm going to go from this one over here. So I'm doing a really quick selection around kind of halfway through. Then hit 'Layer Mask', you might do something more like that. I'm going to undo again. I've seen them quite cool where it's just like, kind of like, I don't know, a box, I must do that. The cool thing about it is, because it's on its own layer, with my Move Tool I can just kind of move it around to kind of best get where I want it to be. No way is good. I can transform it. So I transform, I use 'Command T', or 'Control T' on a PC, then go back to my 50:50. Hit 'return'. I like that. 
So that is our Duo Tone effect. That's going to be us in this video. Let's get on to the next one where we set a couple of projects.