This tutorial shows you how to make duotone and tritone images in Photoshop. As you can guess two colors are used to create duotone photos and three to create tritones. From the artistic perspective, duotone helps to focus attention on shape, form and texture of the photo. Also, duotone is used to bring out middle tones and highlights of an image. The most common colors used in making duotones and tritones are blue, yellow, browns and reds. You should choose the color for duotone based on the mood of your photo.

How to make duotone photo

Duotone Before and After

1. First step in making a duotone image is to convert your photo to black and white. Follow this tutorial How to convert your photo to black and white. Afterwards, don’t forget to convert your RGB image to Grayscale (Image -> Mode -> Grayscale).

2. Now your image is ready to be converted to a duotone image.
Open duotone panel in Photoshop Image -> Mode -> Duotone. Change the type from monotone by default to duotone. Pick the black color as the first color and then decide what second color better fits your image. Select a second color from color palette. You can try different colors until you like your result. You can also try any of the multiple drop down presets.

3. Convert your image to RGB (Image -> Mode -> RGB) and save it.

How to make tritone photo

Tritone Before

Tritone After

1. Follow the step 1 from above.

2. Open duotone panel in Photoshop Image -> Mode -> Duotone. Change the type to tritone. Leave the black color as the first color. Select a second and third color from color palette.

3. Convert your image to RGB (Image -> Mode -> RGB) and save it.