A Little Egret wading through the shallows of the Okavango Delta makes a beautiful monochrome subject, but does it benefit from split toning? There was little by way of colour in this scene, the bird itself being mostly black and white anyway made the decision to go monochrome fairly easy.
Split toning images in Lightroom.
When I first processed this image, I decided to go with a toned effect utilizing Lightroom. After using the B&W tab to arrive at a monochrome image, I then went into the Split Toning tab and used the values shown below. This is really just a matter of personal taste and the settings were arrived at after some trial and error. Today if processing the image as a monochrome, toned or not, I may well go into Silver Efex Pro as an alternative. That way I could move quickly through some of the presets to get me to an interesting or pleasing starting point before tweaking the values further.
Check out the Botswana Image Gallery for more. ~KD.