How to create a Duotone effect in Adobe Photoshop CC

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Course info

107 lessons / 16 hours 21 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Course Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan and I am an Adobe Certified Instructor for Photoshop  - this is the Advanced Photoshop course.

This course is not for people new to Photoshop. This is for people who already know the fundamentals. It is for people who have their own ways of doing things but believe there really is a better, faster way to work. 

We will start by learning the best selection techniques available. I promise, by the end of the first section what took you 30mins to mask will now take you 30 seconds. 

What am I going to get from this course?
  • 13+ Hours of content!
  • 10+ Interactive exercises
  • 68 downloadable resources
  • You'll learn the best selection and masking techniques
  • You'll know how to fix images that look 'hard to fix'
  • You'll master advanced levels and curves tricks, specifically with skin, adjusting and enhancing colors
  • You'll learn how to enlarge images without distortion and what to do when things go wrong
  • You'll know how to convincingly remove all kinds of objects from images
  • My favourite: You'll master the ability to distort, bend and reshape images
  • Lets look at how current trending styles are super easy to duplicate
  • You will become a type nerd. We'll use font pairing in Typekit. We'll also use Photoshop's ability to guess fonts
  • Your Artboards skill will be mastered
  • A master of retouching, you will become!
  • You'll learn to edit videos in Photoshop, who'd have thought?
  • We'll also create awesome cinemagraphs, AKA: Moving pictures!
  • You'll learn to master 3D in Photoshop!
  • You'll learn lots about professional, reusable mockups, techniques and shortcuts!

Here's some of the things we'll be doing in this course:
We will correct 'hard to fix' images and learn what to do with blurry images. We will master Advanced Levels & Curves tricks and will work specifically with skin, adjusting and enhancing colours. 

You will learn how to enlarge images without distorting them and also, what to do when things go wrong. 

We will learn how to convincingly remove all kinds of objects from images. My personal favourite section will show you how to distort, bend & reshape images.

We will look at how current trending visual styles are easily created, duotones, glitches and orange/teal colour grading.

We get 'type nerdy' and use font pairing in Typekit. We will use Photoshop to identify the fonts used in an image and learn how to work with hidden glyphs & ligatures as well as variable & open type fonts.

You will master artboards while you are learning how to make easily updatable multiple sized social media & ad banner graphics. 

There is a big section on advanced retouching techniques, advanced healing, advanced cloning & patching. 

You will learn how to edit videos in Photoshop. We will also animate static images creating parallax videos plus the very cool cinemagraphs sometimes called 'living pictures' - great for social media. 

You will learn to master 3D in photoshop. We will finish off the course with professional, reusable mockup techniques & shortcuts. 

This course has a strong focus on workflow. We use real world, practical projects and show you the professional techniques and shortcuts which will save you hours using Photoshop. Throughout the course I have many class exercises for you to use in order to practice your skills. 

Who am I? 
As well as being an Officially Certified Expert by Adobe, I’m photoshop guru and user with 18 years Photoshop experience. I make tutorial videos directly for Adobe and will again this year be presenting a seminar on  Photoshop at Adobe’s 20 thousand attendee strong Max Conference.  

If you can’t remember the last time you sat down and went through the updates in Photoshop, let this course be your one stop professional development and upgrade path.   

Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your Photoshop mind. Sign up now!

Course duration 13 hours 45 mins + your study.



Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at how to create the Duotone effect. It's quick, it's easy, but we'll go in a little bit deeper to have a bit more control about what gets covered in using shapes and circles. I'll show you some good places to find gradients in terms of colors. All right, let's jump in.


 From the '05 Color' folder open up 'Duotone 1' and '2'. We'll start with 'Duotone 1', and let's look at the basics. There's a ton of ways of recreating the Duotone effect. I think the easiest way is have the layer selected, go to 'Adjustments', go to this one here that says 'Gradient Map'. Click on that, click on this bar that runs through the middle. There's a bunch of kind of presets. Lots of them terrible. Let's first of all look at kind of getting some colors. I'm going to click 'OK' on this one. Let's go to 'Window', 'Extensions', 'Adobe Color Themes'. 


First thing you need to do is switch it to 'Explore'. Just gives you kind of access to 'Most popular this month'. You can play around with Most popular of all time, this week. So go down until you find something you like, this one looks good. Kru-crip-poos, I can't say that word. Best way is to click on this little dot, and say, add to my swatches, please. If you can't see your swatches, the library might open up, but don't worry. Let's close this down, make sure you can see your Swatches Panel. If you can't, go to 'Window', go to 'Swatches', and now when you click on your 'Gradient Map', you can say, I want you, double click on that, and then just kind of click-- you might have to scroll down on this, and say, I want maybe this first color. One of the colors needs to be dark. If it's not, you end up with just weird things happening. One of them needs to be dark to fill in all the shadows - click 'OK' - and one of them needs to be light, so double click on the little house. That will work. Click 'OK'. 


Don't be afraid of putting in a third color. All you do is click anywhere along the bottom here where these guys are kind of positioned, so about there you get a third color. You can have a fourth and a fifth as well. To get rid of them click, hold, and just drag down, just drag them down, they just disappear. This one here, I'll double click, kind of grab one of those middle colors from this. One of these two. Just to kind of fill out the Mid Tones. Then with a little bit more control you can grab these diamonds, this is just, you can see what it does, it just kind of like forces this color to occupy a little bit more of the gradient. And you can decide on how you want to do this. You can't see the diamond on this side, just click on any of the houses, and just decide where this location is. So technically not a Duotone anymore, it's like a Tritone. 


Let's do what we saw at the beginning there, where we turned it into text, grab the 'Type Tool', click once. What brand is this like? I don't recognize that brand on the shoe. If you know what it is let me know, I'm just going to-- looks like 80s. It's the only skating brand I remember from my youth. Picking a nice big thick font. I'm not worried about the color at the moment, because I'm going to use it like, actually going to go way past the size. So I want this kind of like super graphic style. I'm going to go even bigger. Cool, Dan. 


So now what we need to do is turn this text into a selection because I want to stick it into the-- by default, with any adjustment layer you're given an empty layer mask, just handy instead of having to add one. So I want to turn this into a selection. The trick is, hold down the 'Command' key on a Mac, the 'Ctrl' key on a PC, and just click the icon. It doesn't work if you did the same, and click the actual word here. So hold down the 'Command' key and click the icon. It turns that whole bit of text into a selection. When I'm done I’m going to turn that text off. Click on my 'Layer Mask', and now I could go up to 'Edit', 'Fill', 'Fill with Black', or I've got black as my foreground color, remember, D just kind of forces it to be black and white. X toggles it back and forth. Using our shortcuts. 


So black's the foreground color. Who remembers how to fill with foreground color? That's right, you hold down 'Option' and hit 'Backspace' or 'Delete'. If you're on a PC, it’s 'Alt-Backspace'. It's kind of what I wanted, actually I'm going to undo that, I'm going to invert the selection first, so 'Select', 'Invert', then I'm going to go and fill it. That's kind of the look I was going for. All right, Duotone number 2. Let's get a little bit more control over how the gradient is applied. So background selected, 'Adjustments', 'Gradient Map'. I'm going to show you another little-- it's not really a trick, it's more just where I get my colors from often. It's called Grabient, it's like the gradients that are in here. I'm going to use this one here. 


All you do is click on this and grab this first part, the Hexadecimal color code. Click on your Gradient, double click the first little Swatch, and just paste it in down here. It's my first color. Then this one here. I'll click you. So there's my kind of gradient. Now we can play with this a little bit, like we did in the last one to kind of adjust like where, what gets affected and what doesn't, but a lot more control can happen when you click 'OK'. And you put in a black and white Adjustment Layer in between gradient and backgrounds. So I'm going to go to 'Adjustments', I'm going to go to 'Black and White', which is this one. Just make sure it's underneath gradient. So black and white, let's turn the top one off. If you haven't used black and white, it's just-- instead of just going like convert to grayscale, this one here allows - it's an effect, - so it allows you to decide, the reds, are they dark or are they light? Let's turn it off. 


So, see there's a kind of blue in the hat. Instead of just leaving it as default, you can grab the cyan and say, actually I want, so you get real good control. So with them all combined, you can start to decide what gets applied to the Duotone, and what doesn't. So work your way through, decide how you want this to be applied. I'm happy with that. And maybe just for giggles, we'll put some banding in it, or maybe a circle. So I'm going to grab my 'Rectangle Tool', and I'm going to draw a big rectangle that goes through here. I'm going to apply-- I'm just going to make sure, it's not kind of mixed up with my little group down here. I'll make this a little bit bigger so you can see. And I'm going to grab a different Fill color. Complimentary? Maybe. That one's kind of cool. 


So I'm going to grab that one, and instead of applying it as a Gradient Map, which applies to my image, I'm going to do it actually to the rectangle. So I've used the actual Rectangle Tool down here, which gives me some options over here in my Properties Panel. You can double click the Swatch, apply a Gradient instead of a Gradient Map, but this only can be applied to these shapes, not our original image. So we need the Gradient Map but there's another trick we can do with shapes. So I'm going to click on this little Gradient down the bottom here. Click on this, like before. One color, there's my purple. Kind of what I want, maybe I'm going to rotate it around so it is that way. Close it down, 'Move Tool'. 80s banding coming right up. 


Now what I might have to do is, shrink it down a little bit, I'm going to find a Blending Mode that works. Remember my shortcut, 'Shift', so I'm on 'Move Tool', 'Shift', hit '+'. I'm just going to work through things that are, bits that I like, that's looking kind of cool, Hardlight. Hardlight, that's kind of cool too. But I want two of them. That was just going to be a bit smaller. You can do the same thing with a circle or a star. What you want to do is go look at David Bowie album covers to kind of get your inspiration for, I don't even know what. You see, I try to rotate it and it didn't, the gradient there did not flip around even though I flipped this around. Can you see, the purple ones stay at the top. 


So with this selected, it's actually in effect, so if you double click on your shape here, you could go in here and say, actually I want to reverse it. You go run around in circles. I feel like a gap was needed. So that's Duotone, we took a bit more control out of it by using our black and white Adjustment Layer. And hopefully some new ways to find colors. Let's get into the next video.

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