Photoshop Retro Training
So during these last few weeks the focus has been on getting the courses delivered online and finally there seems to be headway. People seem to be taking advantage of the small bite sized chunks – they can just ring in or email with a problem and depending on the situation either hook up immediately or make a time later in the day.
Online design training is proving to be highly flexible and from the companies point of view no travelling – massive bonus. Very early April saw us doing some Photoshop Retro Training for a designer who was looking to incorporate retro effects into his design work and wanted to be able to create them quickly and easily. We looked a number of different vintage techniques including Duotones.
Photoshop Retro Training Course Examples
Photoshop Training with Greta Powell
The original image (which just happens to be the first in the gallery) is a macro shot of a dandelion and each following photo a variation of the original using a number of different tones, grain and effects with adjustment layers.
Photoshop Retro Effects
What are duotones?
First of all a duotone can be as discreet or as subtle as you like but it is a greyscale photo that uses one contrasting (halftone) colour over another (halftone) colour to accentuate the mid tones and highlights of a photo. On this Photoshop Course we worked mainly from the Mode Menu.
Many claim duotones are a modern ‘thing’ but in actual fact duo’s have been around for a very long time. Think Andy Warhole and vivid pop art and there you go. But to describe it in basic terms its a two colour scheme which are formed from two contrasting colours. Duo is a sum of two parts whilst Tone refers to the colour and is the process of colourising greyscale artwork, in this case with two colours. You are replacing white parts of the artwork with one colour and dark parts with the second.
Firstly we duplicated the layer then went to the Image Menu >Mode and selected Greyscale (images have to be in greyscale to work in Duo, Tri or for that matter Quad tones).
We then selected Duotone from the Type drop down box which gives you access to two sliders – Ink 1, which is usually the default black and Ink 2, which is the second mixer ink. You can, of course change one or both of the ink colours by clicking on the colour square and also control the duotone curve by clicking on the graph icon next to it.
Note! you do need to make sure you type a colour name into the box next to the colour square.
Once your happy with the result press the OK button and you are done. Well almost. On this Online Photoshop Course we took the duotone’s a little further and added grain and blur into the mix to build on the retro look and get the results shown in the posts galleries.
Duotone History Facts
No surprise here but duotones have been around as long as there have been cameras (to be fair I’m not sure its as long as or perhaps it should be nearly as long as). One of the most popular and well known ways that duotone was used was to create Sepia photos which mainly added brown to the photo. This was partly as a preservative process but also to soften up greyscale strict looking people of that era.
Later on Duo’s became more useful as a money saving exercise. For anyone interested in some of these retro processes I’ve popped in a couple of Wiki links for you to follow.
Be warned though this becomes way beyond addictive.
Online Photoshop Training
If you would like to find out a little bit more about the Online Photoshop Courses either the shorter bite sized workshops like this one or a longer course please take a look at the Online Training Page. Our Adobe Courses are delivered with a live instructor at times and dates to suit and are available via Zoom, Teams, WebEx and Google.
Photoshop 2021
Most of our Online Photoshop Training is mainly run on Photoshop 2021. We are happy to run it in earlier versions however some 2021 features are not available in these. You can take a look to see what updated content is available in Adobe’s latest Photoshop upgrade here on the Greta Powell Training blog at:
Onsite Photoshop Training
Once the Government has given the go-ahead to cease lock-down we will also be back delivering Onsite Adobe Courses at your premises. To all my past and current clients I do hope you are all well and I look forward to seeing you again soon and to those I’m yet to meet I am looking forward to that. Thank you all.
Thank you for visiting
Don’t have a good day, have a great one
