Photoshop is a pretty awesome piece of artistic software. You can do just about anything 2D graphics related with it. It has so much power, that somethings just seem a little bit too simple. But with great power, comes a ridiculous amount of menu options. And for the novice, these menus can provide the perfect mechanism to get lost and confused. But, never fear, here at SOTC we do a little graphic design as well as programming.
Today we are going to cover something really simple, taking an image and making it duotone. Just to cover my bases here, duotone simply means two colors. Without going into color schemes, it can be any colors you want. To keep things in the SOTC spirit though, today we are going with white and green.
First of all, however, you need an image. Considering our current craze of iPhone development, I have chosen this beauty:
An iPhone, need anymore info?
I am assuming you know how to open that sucker up in Photoshop. File->Open is not the most complex command in the world. But before we can just go crazy with the duotone, the image has to converted to grayscale. Luckily for us, all we have to do is use some Photoshop magic menus to do this. Go to Image->Mode->Grayscale. You may be prompted to flatten the image, if so just say to flatten. You won't be loosing anything.
That actually looks pretty nice itself.
Once in grayscale, the option to go into duotone mode is ours for the taking. The option can be found in the same way as the grayscale option: Image->Mode->Duotone. When you select this option, you will get a dialog box:
This is a small dialog, but with a lot of color-scheming power. First off, to change your colors, you click on the boxes with the colors. You can also name the color choice with the textbox next to the color box. The neatest, and possibly the most complex, thing about this dialog is the graph next to each color. These graphs determine at what value levels they are present. I found that just playing around with them can net the results you want in the end.
SOTC Duotone for the win!
That's it, it is really and truly that simple. With a couple of menu options, you have reached your destination. There are other ways to get a duotone image to be sure, but to my knowledge this is the quickest and easiest. With that, I am going to wrap up this tutorial. Just never forget, when you need programming or design help, just Switch On The Code.
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