How to create a Duotone effect in Adobe Photoshop CC

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.