Can I get a tritone with AE 6 Standard

[Andrew Yoole]

You can get a Duotone effect using Adjust/Hue-Saturation.

If you upgrade to 6.5 you’ll get CC Toner, a three-colour tinter that works like a Tritone setup.

If you have access to Chris and Trish Meyer’s Creating Motion Graphics books (and anyone serious about using AE should own both of them) the cover CD on one of ’em includes a similar 3 colour tint plugin from Boris FX.

Trapcode Shine can work as a great 3 or 5 colour tint plugin. Just turn the Ray Length and Light Boost parameters to 0.

[Filip Vandueren]

If you can bare breaking it up in multiple layers to achieve the effect try this:

using 3 copies of the layer:

• desaturate the bottom layer using your favourite method (be it channel mixer, hue/saturation etc.)
  • give it a a levels-effect, setting:
    RGB: input white: 128 / output white:128; (all the other params @ default value)
  • then add a tint-effect and
    think of black as the black value of the tritone
    think of white as the mid value of the tritone
    forex. black = red, white=orange
• desaturate the middle layer
  • give it a Shift Channels-effect, setting:
    Take Alpha From Luminance
  • then add a levels-effect, setting:
    RGB: input Black: 128
    Alpha: input Black: 128
  • then add a tint-effect and
    think of black as the mid value of the tritone (same as white color in the bottom layer)
    think of white as the white value of the tritone
    forex. black = orange, white=yellow
• give the top layer a transfer mode of luminosity

alter the opacity of the top layer to taste, and precompose if that’s more handy.

This should achieve a ‘true’ tritone effect using standard filters, just keep in mind you use the same “mid” value in both tint filters.

[Martti Ekstrand]

The quick’n’dirty way in both AE and Photoshop is just creating a solid layer with the colour you want to tint with and set it’s transfer mode to … umm … ‘color’ and then adjust the colour until you have look you want. You probably need to adjust the image layer with levels as well, especially punch the highlights to full white.

cheers