Split Toning

Bluish black and white tone

Sharp eyes and lips

Soft face

Pearl necklace

Because Warren commented on one of my visual critiques about split toning an image, I decided to randomly try it out on some photos I did with a friend recently. My friend is applying to photography school, and I am a serious photographer. I did not like the original image as a whole but only some key elements. I knew I could make it look spectacular by tweaking it a bit. I did not like the way the picture was framed so I cropped it. My friend and I have two different philosophies. I crop in the camera, meaning I essentially crop when I'm taking the picture so that what I shoot is the final image in reference to cropping. My friend likes to crop more after so she has more information and creative choices available. Neither way is incorrect, just different opinions.

Anyways, I also used gaussian blur with an opacity of around 50%, I think, erased the blur from the eyes and lips, and the spot healing brush tool. I also used the dodge tool to brighten the catch lights in the eyes, the little white windows in the iris of the eye. Warren had commented on turning an image into black and white using an adjustment layer and then doing a color balance layer and adjusting, in the shadows, the blue and in the highlights, the yellow. I did this and liked the effect with this image. The reason this works is because these colors are complements of one another on the color wheel. Because of this, I reasoned that the same thing would work with increasing red in the shadows and cyan in the highlights. The above image was the result.

Below is the original image: