Oregon, USA:  Columbia River Gorge and north Oregon coast. 5th November 2018. (Trip summary and links to posts).

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The images have titles only.  However, you can refer to the equivalent colour post with more images and more information: Waterfalls and a Wreck.    

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La Tourell Falls.

What are Quadtones?

Everyone is familiar with black and white images or prints.  There are also various ways of adding colour to images, or toning, dating back to the days of darkroom printing.  Monochromes are black and white images toned with a single colour.  In the days of darkroom printing from film, this would involve a chemical process to produce effects such as sepia toning, selenium toning or cyanotype.  Those chemicals were also potentially dangerous.  Duotones assign two colours to different tonal ranges.  A simple way to achieve this was to use a coloured paper.  So if the paper were yellow, whites would be yellow and other tones would be a blend of the toning colour and the paper colour.  Tritones then applied three colours to tonal ranges, and quadtones four.

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View from Vista House..

Duotones, tritones and quadtones were mainly commercial printing processes rather than processes in the chemical darkroom.  Those printing processes used CMYK (combining cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks) rather than the RGB (red, green and blue inks) in the colour chemical darkroom or in modern digital processing and printing.  Colour printing was expensive, requiring four passes with cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks, carefully combined for realistic colour.  Instead there could be toning: duotones, tritones and quadtones.  This was initially to save costs but could also have artistic effects.

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Multnomah Falls.

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Multnomah Falls.

How have I done these quadtones?

I have previously done posts with monochromes, duotones and tritones.  Capture One is my main editing program.  While there are many presets available for monochrome at least, I tend not to use other peoples’ presets as i would rather make my own decisions.  Presets are also less suitable the further you go into duotone, tritone and quadtone, because each image can have quite different tonal ranges, so the distribution of colours could appear quite different.

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Mossy branches and autumn leaves on the side of the cliff at Multnomah Falls.

For duotones I used the sliders in Capture One which makes it fairly simple.  Lightroom used to have similar sliders but they replaced them with  colour wheels, perhaps more powerful but more complex.  Capture One has colour wheels as well as the sliders.  For tritones, I started from a duotone and changed the colours for highlights or shadows, using colour wheels on a layer.

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Rocks and plants on the side of the cliff at Multnomah Falls.

For these quadtones, I looked first at how you can do quadtones in Photoshop and found the colours were more integrated than in the approaches I had been using, so I changed my approach.  (I may also do a subsequent post using the Photoshop method.)  

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“A burst of autumn colour” on the side of the cliff at Multnomah Falls.

Just in case anyone is not aware, a histogram is a graph of tonal ranges for a particular image, from dark on the left to light on the right.  In Capture One, I created four layers restricted to each quartile of the histogram, though fading out from there.  I then assigned colours to each of the layers.  Quadtones come from commercial colour printing using CMYK inks.  Black was one of those inks else the density of the print might not be sufficient, so black was usually also a colour in a commercially printed quadtone.  In the following quadtones, I have sometimes used black as one of the colours, sometimes white, and sometimes four different colours.

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Trees with mossy branches on the side of the cliff at Multnomah Falls.

I tried one of the images below in a test and it worked fine.  Then I tried some live music images and that didn’t work so well with no further adjustments.  Most were low-key images (mainly dark), some were high-key (mainly light) and many did not have tonal ranges spread evenly over the histogram.  Many of the colours I was trying to combine didn’t really show. That also initially applied to many of the images below.  So I used a variety of methods to match my intended colours to the tones in each image.  Adjustments for each of the four quadtone layers included adjusting the range covered, adjusting the intensity of colour in the colour wheels, adjusting the colour balance, and curve adjustments overall or for individual colours.  I also made some tonal adjustments to the image overall and to masked layers. .

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A rock at the base of the falls.

Overall, then, a complex and time-consuming process.  Of course how well an image works and how much time I have spent on it may be two quite different things.  The images are quite varied due to individual processing..

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A small tree near the base of Multnomah Falls.

(If I request AI advice on this writing it will probably tell me to weave an emotive personal story like a wordy advertising trap on Facebook, but I have no interest in doing that.  There’s always just the images.).

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Wreck of the Peter Iredale.

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Wreck of the Peter Iredale.

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Wreck of the Peter Iredale.

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Wreck of the Peter Iredale.

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Wreck of the Peter Iredale.

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A few stray bits of the wreck poking out of the beach.

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A few stray bits of … no, hold on they are people.

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Helicopter passing by.

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Coastline of Ecola State Park.

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Coastline of Ecola State Park.

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Coastline of Ecola State Park.

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