How to set a colored light or dark point?

Question

I'm not sure what this photographic style is called and I'm not sure how to create it in Photoshop.

I have a portrait and I've spent a couple hours messing with hue / saturation, color mixing, following tutorials for "split toning" but am unable to get the effect (the skin in my photo is still white, it's just that the other colors that are red tinted (but even then, not to the desired color).

Maybe I have to do a very finely tuned black and white filter to get the skin gray, and then try to tint that? But even then, I don't know how to get it to tint to a specific hexadecimal color.

I guess what I'm trying to do is set my white point to a specific color (so where it's white, it will actually be color X), and my black point to a specific color, and apply that to a grayscale photo.

I don't need this for a project, just trying to learn by recreating the design. Any help would be appreciated.

(Talking about the photograph, not the web design.)

Answer 1

Make a gradient map layer, Layer → New Adjustment Layer → Gradient Map....

Image 1: Gradient map applied on image (photo source)

Obviously this effect can also be done without gradient maps. Here are some ways:

• Make image grayscale, save that as a selection. Fill background color, load selection, make new layer fill foreground color.

• make image grayscale, apply curves on that. This has the benefit of being able to control the interpolation per channel.

But there are more ways..