How to get this effect...

[AJCupples]

I'm a Gimp novice, so I need some help...

http://www.johngreenbooks.com/ <-- on this author site, on the main page, there's a blue and yellow photo of John Green and I was wondering how I could get an effect like that on my own pictures?? I've messed about with a few things, but they failed badly. Can anyone help me, please?

Thanks in advance.

[Blighty]

Choose the correct type of photo. Probably quite dark with lighting on the side of the face.

Set foreground colour to blue, background colour to green. Select the gradient tool and check that gradient is FG to BG (RGB)

Colours > Desaturate. There are 3 options, experiment to see which one works best.

Colours > Map > Gradient Map

Play with contrast etc to get the effect you want.

Others will probably suggest different methods.

[Ofnuts]

Quite simple:

• Color>Desaturate
  
• Set:
  • Foreground color to the color that will replace the darker areas (blue)
    
  • Background color to the color that will replace the lighter areas (greenish)
    
  • Gradient to "FG to BG (RGB)"
    
• Color>Map>Gradient map
  
• Make ellipse selection around face, Select>Invert and Select>Feather heavily (I used 100px in the 400x400px picture)
  
• Add transparent layer, and bucket-fill selection
  

   

   

But...

1. A frequent mistake is to believe that this gives good results on any picture. The pictures on which this effect works are pictures with a fairly even spread of luminosity ranges, those where the histogram is rather flat and has no visible spikes.
   
2. The hard part if to come up with two colors that work well together, aesthetically of course, but also technically. A gradient between a hard blue and a hard yellow will either contain a lot of gray in the middle (RGB gradient) or a wide area of green (HSV) gradient. The color for the darks (bluish) has to have less luminosity than the color for the lights (yellowish), but the colors between the two should also have a progressive increase of luminosity. And if you look closely you find that the color for the lights is actually more green than yellow, its looks yellow because it is against the blue.
   

[Espermaschine]

The effect is mostly called a Duotone.

This is how i would do it:

   

Very easy to change the colours with this technique (Drag & Drop, Hue/Saturation Tool), and you can tweak the layermask "live" with curves (for contrast and brightness), which i find much better than the trial and error of the Gradient Map.

The vignette is just a circular hole punched in a layer and blurred.

[AJCupples]

Thank you everyone! I'll give them a try.