The popular trend of late 2017 and 2018 is doing rounds everywhere from professional graphic design, photography to social media uploads of millions of people, Duotone is everywhere. The latest, viral and vibrant trend of 2018 is Duotone. The web is full of duotone images, making it probably the best trend in the designing industry for 2018, and brands like Spotify are using it as their signature look for various platforms, posts, and marketing.
Spotify image
What is Duotone or Duotone effect?
Breaking the word conveys its meaning without any effort. Duo+tone, Double tone or double color or duotone, you can call it the way you like. Duotone is the reproduction or editing of images with the imposition of other colors, generally two to create a dual-tone image. Halftone of one color is superimposed on other color halftone creating middle tone, highlights, effects of an image. In simple words, the duotone is when an image is made or edited in just two colors contrasting each other to create an image with only two colors, which are not the actual colors of the photo or image. The superimposed contrasting halftone color is generally and traditionally black, and the most commonly used colors are blue, yellow, brown, and red. However, there are many varieties of color combinations used.
How to create a Duotone image?
Duotone images can be easily created by using Adobe Photoshop and the tool Colofilter.css. Other than this various social media filters and apps like a duotone-photo filter for androids and duotone+ for ios operating systems are also available which can be used for non-professional image editing. Duotone editing tools like Adobe Photoshop calculates the highlights and middle tones of a grayscale image and allows the user to choose any other hue for the second color.
A duograph practice commonly known as fake duotone is done by printing a single color with a one-color halftone over it, which is easier to create but is not preferred over the traditional method. Duotone’s emergence has taken the technology of manipulating images to another level which resulted in creating other tone images of tritone and quadra tone. We may see many other advances in technology due to extensive use.
Why Duotone images?
The concept is getting bigger every day with brands and the number of people using it and the reasons are many. Here are the reasons for using or creating a duotone image:-
Visually interesting and appealing
Eye-catching and a head-turner
Minimalistic and easy on elements
Easy to create
Contemporary and trending
Bold and quirky
Colorful and beautiful
We will be seeing more of these tinted images and pair of hues for this year to end as the concept has a wider horizon in the design industry and with designers making overused image and logo designs fun to play with surprising colors and elements. What works for duotone images is mixing of the colors seamlessly and creating a swift and smooth movement in the image and the design. So inject some fun colors and take the risk with duotone and deliver something custom and unconventional and not seen before.
