D u o t o n e

The picture at left is an example of our program Duotone. Duotones are images that only display in two colors. The idea of Duotones comes from the world of print. In print, the more colors you use, the slower the production time and the higher the cost. Duotones were often an economical alternative. However, they look good by themselves. Duotones can also enable the creation of good images with small file sizes, loading fast on the Web.

Do you remember old photographs in a nice, cozy brownish color? Our Duotone is the program to produce them, changing from black via brown to white. (So in fact, Duotone actually consists of three colors.) The cozy brown is called chamois in a popup menu with preset colors. The picture on the left is standard brown.

But modern times demand modern colors. The program produces duotones in aqua, ruby, azul or whatever fancy color your taste or customer demands just as easily. See some examples by clicking here

We have some screenshots and a short manual on the following web-pages, showing duotones. See for instance brown tints or, for more exotic, blue and reds. An old darkroom trick, solarization, is possible as well as positive and negative images. With full control over the results! But Duotone has a lot more possibilities, it can help scientists enhance small differences in images. See our micrographs enhanced with Duotone.

All produced with a popup menu
and/or this simple slider:

A small warning: the images produced by Duotone are made by converting your colored picture internally to grayscale and then to RGB. The program does not directly result in a conventional duotone image intended for printing with a commercial printing press with only two inks. But for all other printers, it works perfectly.

Tritone, a part of the Duotone program, even lets you make a choice from four colors. Both Duotone and Tritone allow the strangest color-combinations.

Oh yes, you can produce most, - if not all - the effects in photoshop(©), but photoshop is very expensive, it will take a month or two to figure out how all the options work, and even then, producing these effects is not easy and quick. Here we have a program with a user-friendly interface, producing the result at the click of the mouse.

The interface looks like the picture below, click to enlarge. To use it, start the program, drag and drop your photograph, or open by the file-menu's open command.
Jpeg, tiff, gif, photoshop, PNG, BMP, PDF, all the normal image formats are available as input formats.

For a technical description on duotone click for example here