I Don't Like That Duotone Of Yours Mister!

I havn't had a chance to show some of the things I've been doing in class, but I found todays pretty interesting and have an easy example to show what I learnt.
Today's topic in Digital Image Processing I we were taught Duotones. Basically, it's a way to color a black and white (and grey) photo using only 1 (mono), 2 (duo) or 3 (tri) colors (tones). You start by analyzing the original photo. Our first example was the following photograph:



Looking at the photo, you can see three main different parts - the flowwer petals being white/slightly grey, the leaves beings shades of grey and the shadows in the background are almost completely black or dark grey/black. Therefore, you can distinguish the different parts by applying a color to the amount of grey each part has.

Then you choose your colors. In this example we used three (therefore, it's a tritone) colors - yellow, green and black. The values are set on a graph of Quantity of Color by Amount of Grey. The petals look like they are ~20-30% grey, the leaves 40-60% grey and the backgroung 90-100% grey. Therefore, all you do is set the yellow to "color in" only the regions on the photo that are 20-30% grey. The same concept is used to set the green and black colors. After tweaking the values, you end up with:



Pretty cool, eh?

Our next big project in that class is to make an animation. I thought of a pretty wicked idea for a crazy animation so hopefully I'll be able to use it for the assignment. Look out for that one in the future.