Photo Answers
Andrew is a highly experienced writer and photographer – if you have a problem, he is here to help.
Photo Answers Landscape Special!
Split success
Q I saw some amazing landscape images recently, and the photographer told me they were split-toned. What does that mean?
Mary Lane
A Split-toning is a technique that’s really easy to do in the postprocessing of a raw file, because both Lightroom and Camera Raw have a Split Tone panel you can play with. Essentially split-toning is a type of colour grading that gives a different look to your photograph; it can be used with both colour and black-and-white images. It’s called split-toning simply because you can colour-tone the highlights separately to the shadows.
A visual explanation is probably the easiest approach; here are four different split-tone treatments. In the first image, the highlights are boosted by orange and the shadows by blue so that we have a crossprocess look. In this case, it doesn’t really suit the scene. In the second image, the reverse – orange shadows with blue highlights – has been used, and the result is better for this landscape. In the third
