I really like the look of a good split-tone (or even better, quad-tone photograph).  The only problem is that the traditional way of making duotones/tritones/quadtones in Photosohp (using the Mode > Dutone command) is fiddly, not very interactive, and destructive. (It requires converting your image to eight bit monochrome first.)

Lately, following the suggestions of Paul Butzi, I’ve started using curves to tone my images rather than Photoshop quadtones. Paul has a great tutorial, so I won’t repeat the steps here. Be sure to grab his sample curves files if you try this technique.

But here’s the important thing that Paul doesn’t mention: you can use Photoshop tone curves to duplicate the toning applied by any scheme, be it Photoshop quad tones, your favorite proprietary toning software, fill layers, etc.  That would be a huge pain to do manually. Fortunately,  Guillermo Luijk has written a free utility to “extract”  a tone curve from an image and save it in a tone curve file that can be imported into Photoshop.  See some toned photos you like? Fire up Tonehacker and you can extract the curve from the photos and appy it to your own images. You can also use the technique to duplicate your favorite Photoshop dutotones/tritones/quadtones.  You can download the utility at Guillermo’s website, just look for the “Descargar Tone Hacker 1.2″ link (much of the website is in Spanish). More info about using the software at the Luminious Landscape Forums.

Hat tip to Guillermo for a WONDERFUL program.