Split Toning Panel

Have you ever wondered why the mono prints from some people look just nicer than a plain mono conversion? Why they can have a warm feeling without being obviously toned? I came across this somewhere and have since forgotten where, so here's a thanks to some unknown author who gave me an idea for warming up the shadows which I played with and came out with a nice preset for myself.

It uses the split toning module to give a hint of warmth in the shadows and a hint of coolness in the highlights and it improves things considerably in my mono conversions. You may well have a mono conversion which just works for you every time (and I applaud this), but I like this effect for mine. Obviously, like all presets or PS actions, it doesn't work on every image and requires some tweaking for those it doesn't immediately work on.

Rather than give you a preset, I'll show you what to do to get the effect in your own copy of lightroom and you can save the preset yourself to your own preferred directory.

For testing, I recommend that you have a collection of images or virtual copies of a good variety of image types that you can play with and if they just don't work, you can either hit reset or delete the virtual copy.

Make a mono conversion in whichever way you prefer (I just hit the B&W button on the HSL / Color / B & W panel and used a straight conversion with no adjustments to the sliders for this base image). I've used the image from the previous post for this one as I just love this image in colour and mono!

Here's the image with a plain mono conversion (no adjustment to the colour sliders) for a start image and to allow them to be compared:

Open the Split Toning panel, if it isn't already open and change the highlights Hue slider to about 240 which is a nice blue tone which, when used subtly, gives a hint of coolness to the highlights. That subtlety is by having the highlight slider to a value of only 5. If you have this much higher, it will give a very blue tone and this is meant to be un-noticeable as a tone, but to just nudge the image away from being very plain mono. Once you've done this, take the shadows slider to about 40 which is a nice brown and with subtlety give a touch of warmth to your shadows. Again, we're being subtle, so keep the saturation slider to about 10.

The image with the adjustment made - if you open them both in new tabs and flick between the two, you should see the subtle differences. Barely noticeable, but it gives a much better conversion!

Hope this is of help to someone.