The split toning process blew me away. I always knew that Photoshop was a powerful tool but I never realized how much easier it makes it to achieve effects like this. The first thing I did with the raw file was to convert it into black and white. Then I upped the contrast a little bit and lowered the saturation to level out the midtones. I raised the whites and lowered the blacks, and I got rid of some of the highlights and shadows. I realized something wasn't quite right, so I fiddled with the warmth and tint until I found a setting I liked. Then came the fun part - I opened up the split tone menu and added a high saturation (45) red for the highlights and teal for the shadows, with the balance leaning slightly toward the highlights.

Overall, this was a blast. I'm excited to experiment with these settings more.

For the castle, I employed a similar process for creating a black and white photo as I did with the boats. I chose to really up the contrast on this one, however. After editing in Camera Raw, I switched over to Photoshop to create the tritone effect. I used a custom setting involving Black, Pantone 334, and Pantone 437, and then edited out some of the distractions (birds, mostly) using the clone tool and the healing brush.