Create a duotone effect

A fun way to add interest to imagery in Illustrator is to apply a dual tone effect.

A dual tone effect like you see here applies two colors to content to give it a dual tone like appearance.

In this video, you'll take this image and apply it to a green rectangle as an opacity mask and place it over a blue rectangle to create a duotone effect.

To get started, choose View, Fit All in Window, so you can see a web page design on the left and the original image on the right below this artboard.

After you apply the duotone effect to this image, you complete the web design by dragging it over here.

You'll start by drawing a rectangle.

So, press the letter M to quickly select the Rectangle Tool.

Starting in the upper left corner of this artboard drag down to the lower right corner and release.

You can now apply any color fill you like.

So, click the Fill color and let's apply this green color.

And press the Escape key to hide the panel.

Now you'll mask the green rectangle with the image down here, so that the black parts of the image will hide the green color, white will show the green color and colors in between those will show the green in varying levels of opacity.

This is called an opacity mask.

Press the letter V to select the Selection Tool.

Click the image to select it and cut it off the artboard by choosing Edit, Cut.

You're going to paste it into a mask.

Now you can take the green rectangle and apply the image as an opacity mask using the Transparency panel.

So, select the rectangle and to show the Transparency panel, you can click Opacity over here in the Properties panel.

But opening the Transparency panel separately, so it stays open can actually be easier.

To do that, choose Window, Transparency.

In the panel, you can see the selected rectangle in a thumbnail on the left.

The box in the right is for a mask or content that can hide parts of the artwork on the left.

To start, click the Make Mask button.

By default, a black mask is applied.

Now in Illustrator and Photoshop, a black color in a mask means content is hidden, so you can't see the green out here.

Deselect the Clip option to make the mask white, which means you can see the green fill again.

Now you can paste the image into the mask and the light and darker the image will show and hide parts of the green rectangle.

So, click the mask thumbnail to be able to edit the mask and paste the image by choosing Edit, Paste.

Drag the image into place on the green rectangle right about here.

And you can see that the image is now masking the green color.

To move the rectangle and the mask, you need to click back on the original artwork thumbnail on the left, the green rectangle.

This is really important.

Otherwise, with the mask thumbnail selected, you will be stuck editing the mask and nothing else.

Drag the content off the artboard and you can see what's happening.

The white color was just the artboard underneath it.

To see the mask by itself, Option click on Mac OS or Alt click on Windows the mask thumbnail.

You're now looking at the mask how Illustrator sees it.

Black hides the green, white shows the green and colors between those show the green in varying levels of opacity.

To stop seeing the mask like this, Option click on Mac OS or Alt click on Windows the mask thumbnail again.

With the mask thumbnail selected, you could edit the mask by adding more content, resizing it, doing whatever you need to do.

But to stop editing the mask, so you can continue working, click the artwork thumbnail on the left.

If you were to move the green rectangle on the artboard, the mask would go with it.

If you wanted to move the green rectangle and not the mask, you could click this Lock icon to toggle it off and move them separately.

To put the mask rectangle into position, drag it over the web design on the left.

You can now see that the green color and the blue color of the background make up the two colors for the duotone effect.

This is one of many ways to create effects like a duotone effect to give your artwork some interest.

Give it a try next time you find yourself in the middle of a design project wanting a different look.