Photo Of The Day, March 12, 2013 - Young Monk

Young Monk, Bhutan

It's been a while since I posted an image. Today I was playing around with split toning on an old image I'd shot of a young monk at a monastery in Bhutan.

For those not familiar with Bhutan, it is a Buddhist Kingdom located between China and India where the Buddhist culture has been preserved by limited exposure to visitors and isolation from the outside world.

The original image was a quick grab shot due to its candid nature, so I cropped it a little in Aperture to remove the stairs and other distracting elements. The next step was to convert the image to Black and White.

I used Silver Efex Pro 2, my B&W plugin of choice, keeping it neutral and using a red filter. I also brightened up the monk’s face and robes a little using a couple of control points. Silver Efex has a couple of presets for split toning, and I took a look at them, but decided to do the split toning in Photoshop.

The next step was in Photoshop. I decided to tone the highlights yellow and the shadows red/brown, to preserve the warm tones in the image and the golden color of the monastery door. I added a Color Balance layer, selected the Highlights radio button and dragged the yellow/blue slider to yellow to tone the highlights yellow. Then, selecting the Shadows radio button, I dragged the red/cyan towards red and the yellow/blue towards yellow, adjusting it till it looked good to me.

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