BLUE MONOCHROMES Y
ears ago I spent endless hours in the darkoom. One of the things I enjoyed was toning black and white prints using various toners like sepia and selenium. Today in Photoshop, we work with 16.7 million colors, and without being subjected to toxic vapors from various chemicals, we can tone photographs in any shade imaginable. All of our digital cameras shoot color (unless a camera is converted to infrared), so to tone an image it first has to be converted to black and white. The best way to do that so you can manipulate the highlights and shadows with maximum control is to use the pulldown menu command: Image > adjustments > black
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and white. In the dialog box, you can lighten or darken areas of the image as defined by its original color. Ansel Adams would have given anything to have this kind of control. Once that is done, the image is still in RGB mode. (If you convert to black and white using Image > mode > grayscale, all color is discarded.) This means you can now choose Image > adjustments > color balance and introduce any color you want. The only monochromatic color tones that looks good to me -- and this is very subjective -- is blue and sepia, but I prefer blue or a combination of blue and cyan.
