Goodbye Quadtones... Hello Fill Layer !
Quadtones in Photoshop are only 8 bits per channel. I stopped using them a long time ago - because it's best to perform corrections in a 16-bit color space (See below). Instead, I recommend the Photoshop Fill Layer command. It's much simpler, and much more effective. Best of all, just as with Quadtones, you get to keep your regular RGB inks, and you can choose from a limitless palette of colors. You don't need a dedicated printer, with the additional expense and hassle involved. This technique has another important advantage: it does not increase the size of your file. It's "lossless".
Photoshop Fill Layer: A Better Way to Tone Your Images
There are many ways to tone your monochrome images, but this is the best method I have found to date:
• Convert your image to RGB with 16 Bits per Channel before you perform any adjustments. This ensures that your changes will be as lossless as possible.
• On the main menu, choose Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color. Choose "Color" as the Mode, and leave the Opacity at 100%. (You can change that later). If you know how to use the Layers Palette: Make a new layer, of type Color.
• When you press OK, this will bring up the Photoshop Color Picker window.
• In the Color Picker, you can choose a color on the left, and adjust the palette of colors with the slider, just to the right of the color window. If you slide down, your color will affect the low values more than the high values - and vice versa.
• If you like well-known colors such as Pantone, click on Color Libraries and choose one, whose name you can remember for the future. Photoshop gives you several libraries of colors, but you can always change them. Colors can be adjusted and specified in a number of ways: RGB, HSB, etc. You can also save a color to the Photoshop palette, and use it later. It's probably best to use a soft color at first. You can always undo, and try again.
• Once you press OK, your Fill Layer has been loaded with the toning color. If you earlier chose 100% as the Opacity for this layer, the color may be too saturated. You can adjust the Opacity % of the layer to taste. If you need more color, then create a new Fill Layer - only this time, chose a more saturated color from the color picker percentage. Alternately, you can add a Saturation adjustment layer above the Fill Layer.
• If you like the way it looks, you can now merge the Fill Layer with the background layer. Or, you can leave it as-is. Because it is merely an adjustment layer - and not a copy of the image - it doesn't increase the size of the image.
• If you want to save your file as a JPG, you must change the image mode "down" to 8-bit RGB. (I prefer to to leave it in 16 bits per channel, and save it as a .PSD file.
16-Bit Workflow: Goodbye "Banding", Hello Smooth Tones
When you open an 8-bit grayscale image for editing, you start out with only 256 possible shades. That may sound like a lot of shades, but every time you adjust your image, you lose some of them. When you convert to JPG, you may lose some more shades. By the time you're done, some of your photos may have a "digitized" look, with gaps in the tonal scale. Some people call this banding. With color images, you get banding in each of the 3 color channels. Don't you want to keep all the tones ? Why spend money on fine equipment, only to lose half the quality every time you "correct" an image ?
So work in 16-bit mode if you can. You start out with 65,536 shades of grey. Even if you lose half of them, you still end up with a smooth image. In color, this is really 48-bit mode, since each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels gets 16 bits.
Many digital cameras give you JPG files, which are 8 bits per channel. Before you perform any corrections, convert them to 16-bit. Once the image is in 16-bits-per-channel, any further adjustments will be less destructive, and you will introduce fewer gaps in the tonal range.
When you're all done, you can convert back to 8-bit if you have to. (If you're saving as a JPG image for the web, that down-sizing happens automatically.) Keep your 16-bit version, as your master file.
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