Duotones

I'm loving duotones. It's been a while since I applied the technique and it's nice to come back to it. Duotones (and tritones and quadtones) are incredibly flexible ways to render monochrome images. Traditionally the technique is used in conjunction with printing, but I love the control and the huge range of possibilities. I don't know of another way to achieve the same results with as much consistency.

So my process is to first convert an image to B&W, either in Aperture or using CS3's B&W layer... then I convert to grayscale, then to 8 bits per pixel, and then to duotone. I'm defining my own duotones as I go and saving them, so that I build a library of good combinations. Finally I convert the image back to RGB color.

I liked the results on this one in particular.