Duotoning in DinkyPRO

This article addreses the creation of a duotone image with the Bibble plug-in Dinky - Digital Ink and Light.

What is Duotoning?

Duotone is a traditional printing method that prints an image twice, each time with a different ink. Depending on the image density chosen for each print, the duotoning can accentuate highlights or shadows and/or add a rich, textured feel to an otherwise monochrome image. If the second plate prints only a limited part of the image, the effect is to create a two-colour image.

Using DinkyPRO

We'll be using two channels in DinkyPRO, one for each printing plate. Channel A will be the black plate, and channel B the toning plate. By using a channel for each plate, we can adjust the plate colour and density separately. (It is possible to use Dinky freeware to do basic duotoning, but the black plate must be created in some other tool, such as Andy, and adjusting the density of the toning plate is more difficult as any adjustments to the original black plate will also alter the tone plate.)

Starter Image

Here's our starting image. This shot is unprocessed except for exposure adjustments.

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Black Plate Setup

In channel A of DinkyPRO, make the following change:

A: Saturation Enhance: -2

This produces a black & white image, as below. For the moment, we'll leave this plate as-is and move on to the toning plate.

dinkytone2 Info

Toning Plate Setup

To create a traditional tone in Dinky, you must make four adjustments: Gather, Desaturate, Add saturation, and Hue Shift. Here's what each of those adjustments looks like, isolated to channel B:

Select channel B
B: Hue Gather: 1.0 (image 3)
B: Saturation Enhance: -2 (image 4)
B: Saturation Tone: 0.1 (image 5)
B: Hue Rotate: -40 (image 6)

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Initial Toning Plate Result

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What happened there?

First we gathered all the image hues together, removing the original hue information. Then we removed the original saturation information. Then we added a new saturation value. Then we adjusted the hue of the new colour. The result is a simple monochromatic toned image. This is our toning plate.

Right now, channel A is not visible as channel B overrides it due to its blend mode of Normal. You can click "Enable" in channel B to see channel A once more.

Inking with Channel B

We now want to "ink" channel B over channel A. This will apply the output of channel B to the output of channel A as if B was overprinted, darkening the image. To do this, change the blending mode of channel B:

B: Mix Blending: Ink 
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Channel B Density Adjustment

This image is, of course, too dark. This is because the density (ink level) of plate B is too high -- it's as if we're printing the image twice. To fix the density issue, we'll change the density of Plate B by adjusting it's Midtone slider. Here are three possible values:

B: Luminance Midtone: 0.5 (image 8)
B: Luminance Midtone: 0.7 (image 9)
B: Luminance Midtone: 0.9 (image 10)

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To get a better idea of what the density adjustment is doing to channel B, check the VIS checkbox on channel B. This causes the selected channel to be the only output of Dinky, so you can see exactly what that particular channel does. Here is the VIS view of each of the above settings, 0.5 0.7 and 0.9:

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Channel A Density Tweak

I'm going to use the Midtone value of 0.7; I like the look of it. But I still want to reduce the density of the overall print. To do that, I'll increase the Midtone on channel A just a little.

A: Midtone:  0.05

dinkytone14 Info

I like this toning a lot. It has a very traditional feel with a richness not usually associated with digital photos.

Channel A Toning

As an encore, I'm going to adjust channel A so that it isn't "printing" black ink, but instead dark blue. Here's the changes:

A: Vis: Checked (to see what I am doing) (Image 15)
A: Saturation Tone:  0.05 (Image 16)
A: Hue Gather:  1 (Image 17)
A: Hue Rotate:  160 (Image 18)

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Notice in image 16 what happens when saturation is shifted after being desaturated? The original colours in the image return, but all at the same saturation level. That's why we need to gather the hues (image 17) if we want a single toning colour -- to eliminate the residual hue of the starter frame. Once the hues are gathered, we can shift that hue to the colour of the tone we wish to apply.

Final Image

Turning channel A's VIS checkbox off reveals the final image:

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This is an extremely rich image, although it has no original colour in it. The blue plate (Channel A), printed first and fairly dark, dominates in the shadows. The sepia plate (Channel B), printed second and quite light, dominates the highlights. And both plates are interacting across the entire image tonal range, producing an image with a great deal of subtle tonality.

DinkyPRO's four channels can create an image with up to four plates. However, you may find it difficult to tackle something that complex right off the bat. Start simple!