I received a couple of e-mails asking me how I did the toning for the series of images featuring Elle that are in the gallery. Thought I'd just give a quick rundown.

You know me and how many images I usually have to process from a shoot, so I keep things as simple as I can whenever possible. This is no exception. The Elle series ended up being 4 layers altogheter - only 3 are seen together for the final image with the original B&W underneath them just to be saved with the PSD.

The steps were as follows:

1. I bring the color image into Photoshop as a B&W image - it's processed to be a little flat (meaning the contrast is below what it will be for the final image). That will be added later. If you do your B&W conversion inside PS, do that here and then move on to #2.

2. Do any cleanup that needs to be done on the image (blemishes, stray hairs if they distract, things in the foreground or background that distract, etc).

3. Once that's done, and I've saved this, I begin to work up the layers. Above this background I create the toning layer. Use whatever method you want to tone the image (toning curves, hue/saturation layer in colorize mode, solid color overlay whatever).

4. Create a new layer above these two and MERGE VISIBLE to give a fully toned image above the other two.

5. GAUSSIAN BLUR this layer at a radius of 30 (my images are over 2000x3000 - if you run smaller sizes, you may need to adjust this radius down some; larger, go up).

6. Set the blending mode of this layer to SOFT LIGHT. You should have an image that is extra rich in contrast, deepness of tones and saturated toning color. It will also show up any texture in the image a lot.

7. Now adjust the opacity of this layer to your liking. For the Elle series, the opacity values range from 45-65% on most of them.

8. The final (fourth) layer is a CURVES adjustment layer. I use a very small S-Curve to give it that little, extra contrast pop. It's a curve that has an anchor point at INPUT 128/OUTPUT 128 to hold the midtones. The highlight anchor point is at INPUT 202/OUTPUT 204 and the shadow at INPUT 50/OUTPUT 48. This little 2 down/2 up curve stretches the highlights from the shadows just enough to give a little more oooomph (I know, technical term).

And that's it. Some people do the SOFT LIGHT layer without the gaussian blur. I like the blur as it seems to add a bit of radiating warmth to the image without blurring the crap out of texture.

It probably takes longer to read the above than to actually do it all. After image cleanup, the rest takes me under 30 seconds to do and if you process your images to B&W consistently you'll find that you are almost using the exact same parameters again and again.

For those wondering about how I do the B&W conversion, I have my RAW converter set up to do it using a special monochrome profile that allows me to process them from start to finish as B&W. I can use the Exposure, Contrast, Color Temperature and Tint controls of my converter to tweak the overall look.

Good luck.

-=>Donald