True sepia toning began around the 1880s with photographic prints that were exposed to sepia in order to aid in replacing the metallic silver in the photo emulsion with a silver compound. By doing so the developer could change the color, obviously, but also increase the tonal range of the photo. It was also believed that the sepia toning increased the photo’s longevity by replacing the less stable metallic silver. Indeed, a lot of sepia prints remain to this day. Sepia, it turns out, is simply ink extracted from a cuttlefish (the European Common Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis)), a cephalopod closely related to octopuses and squid!

European Common Cuttlefish provided the original sepia ink. (Photo credit; Hans Hillewaert, Wikimedia Commons)

Many of the sepia tone simulations in Photoshop are not terribly convincing. Some look too much like someone placed a beige filter over the image, without actual tone mapping of the sepia to the shadows, midtones, and highlights. While these are certainly not the only, or necessarily best, ways to go sepia, I would like to go over some of the ways Photoshop offers for sepia toning, so that you can judge for yourself what method may be best for any given situation.

First, you must start with a black and white or grayscale image. You can accomplish this so many ways digitally, or just shoot in black and white to begin with, so I’ll leave it up to you to pick a method for desaturating your photo.

Originally a color photo, this version was desaturated simply by setting the saturation to 0% with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

1. Gradient map adjustment layer

You can open a gradient map layer, and choose an appropriate gradient. This one’s called “light brown” and ships with Photoshop. You can also alter the standard maps, or create a new, custom gradient map pretty easily. I set the layer’s opacity to 55%. Try changing the gradient map layer blend mode to overlay or soft light. If you go to soft light, you can increase the layer’s opacity for a more intense effect. This blend mode seems to help map the tones even more effectively.

Using a gradient map to simulate sepia tone

Same gradient map, but blend mode set to soft light with increased layer opacity

2. Photo filter adjustment layer

This adjustment layer even comes with a filter named “sepia.” You definitely have to tweak the density level. It might help to play with the layer’s opacity and blend modes, as in method 1).

Photo filter adjustment layer contains a sepia option.

3. Black and white adjustment layer

The black and white adjustment layer first became available in Photoshop CS3. It’s an excellent way to make a black and white image, because not only can you adjust the intensity of the tones with color sliders, but since it’s applied as a layer adjustment, it doesn’t actually alter the image’s pixels, and can be changed or deleted at any time. When you open this adjustment, there is a checkbox for “Tint.” If you check this, you can create a sepia look by clicking the small color box next to the check box, and picking a color you find close to sepia. You can’t blend this tint as easily as with some other methods, but the nice part is the ability to further modify your black and white settings, after the sepia tint is applied.

The black and white adjustment layer allows you to create a black and white image and add sepia-like tint in one operation.

4. Color balance adjustment layer

You can even use a color balance layer to simulate sepia. Using a black and white image in the RGB color mode, I just added some yellow and red to the midtones. Make sure your image isn’t in Grayscale mode, or you won’t be able to use this option, since there’s technically no color to balance!

Using color balance can add yellows and reds to simulate sepia.

5. Hue/saturation adjustment layer

Open the hue/saturation layer along with your desaturated image, choose the “Colorize” check box, and the layer will allow you to apply a tint. Choose a hue closest to what you like, and lower the saturation.

Hue/saturation colorize settings

6. Curves adjustment layer

You can even use curves to simulate sepia toning! Most commonly it’s used for control over contrast, but open the curves adjustment layer, and click on the little pull-down menu so you can adjust curves for the individual RGB channels. Choose the green channel and pull the curve slightly below the midline, more or less in the center of the grid. This will increase the magenta in the image, and decrease the green. Similarly, choose the blue channel and pull the line down a bit more to increase yellow, and decrease blue.

Increasing magenta in the green channel with curves

Increasing yellow in the blue channel with curves

Sepia tone simulated with a curves adjustment

7. Solid color layer

Adding a solid color adjustment layer is not something I often do in Photoshop. But it’s an easy and editable way to tint an image. Open a new solid color layer on top of your image, and the color picker will automatically open. Choose a color to represent your desired tint and click OK. Now have some fun, and tweak the solid color layer’s opacity and blend modes. Don’t leave the blend mode at normal, or the image will look very murky. Your best bet will most likely be soft light or overlay, as these two map tones nicely into an image.

Simulated sepia with a solid color layer set to overlay, with reduced opacity.

Simulated sepia with a solid color layer set to soft light, with reduced opacity.

Creating a duotone in Photoshop can get you even closer to simulating a good sepia tone. But there are two reasons I’m not presenting it here. One, there’s already a great tutorial on duotones right here at Convert Duotones in Photoshop. Second, making a duotone requires some “no-turning-back” operations, like discarding color info, that are best avoided if possible.

There you have it. Seven ways to sepia, and I’m sure you can discover more. Personally, I’m leaning towards using the black and white adjustment layer to remove color, and then creating a solid color adjustment layer above it all to add the sepia tone. This gives you a lot of flexibility. The black and white adjustment layer makes fine tuning your tones easy, and can always be undone and tweaked in the future. The solid color layer lets you change the tint at any time also, and you can more completely control the opacity, and blend mode, of the sepia tint. Best of all, no cuttlefish were harmed in the making of this article.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

Discover Seven Ways to Create Sepia Images in Photoshop

Sometimes black and very dark tones in a photo can appear a little weak or washed out. There are a lot of ways to correct this, but some methods can sometimes cause other unwanted changes in your photo. I’d like to present a way I came across recently to increase the density and saturation of black while leaving other tones and colors unaffected.

I shot this photo on a very bright day in the afternoon. Given the brightness of the situation, I wanted a fast shutter speed, but the face of the sign was in shadow, albeit very bright shadow. I had to find an exposure that would retain the very bright background as well as the face of the sign — too long of an exposure would blow out all the brighter aspects, like the sky, and too short of an exposure wouldn’t show the darker face of the sign, which was my subject. I wound up going with 1/250 shutter speed at f/5.6.

Jpeg as produced by the camera, with no adjustments

The blue sky was retained and the sign face wasn’t too dark, but the lettering was a bit soft, and just not as defined as I wanted it to be.

After my usual workflow in Adobe Camera Raw (adjust white balance, tweak saturation and luminance of blues and greens a little bit), I opened the image in Photoshop. I then did the usual modifications: reduce noise, especially the noise in the blue sky; sharpen the image; add a vignette to bring attention to the sign. I added a Curves adjustment layer to increase overall contrast, but the results just seemed to lighten and wash out the brighter tones too much, and didn’t do too much to the darker tones. (I did however want to darken the green frame of the sign, so I selected it with the Magic Wand tool and added a Curves layer so that just the selected portions of the sign frame would be affected. I then just chose the “Darker” Curves preset).

I still wanted to make the black lettering of the sign really stand out. They are a huge part of the image. I knew Curves wasn’t going to work like I wanted. Levels produced pretty much the same story — washed-out highlights. Hue/Saturation didn’t do the trick either. After experimenting (i.e. messing around) with these different adjustments, I tried the Selective Color adjustment layer.

Selective Color always seemed to me just that — for color adjustments. But it turns out you can choose black as well as white and a neutral gray to adjust. I still wanted to limit the adjustment to the sign lettering only, so I drew a selection around the perimeter of the sign with the polygonal lasso tool.

Making a selection with the polygonal lasso tool.

This way, when I open the Selective Color adjustment layer, the active selection around the sign is assigned automatically to the mask that opens with the adjustment layer. You can see in the layer thumbnail that the area I selected is white, and the surrounding area is black. The effects of the layer are only seen where the mask reveals the adjustment, where the mask thumbnail appears white.

Selective Color adjustment layer and its mask based on the previous selection.

With the Selective Color layer restricted by the mask to alter only the sign area, I scrolled through the pull-down menu until I got to black. You can do all kinds of amazing color changes here by altering the amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow, or black in whatever color you’re working on.

You can do amazingly precise adjustments with Selective Color. Here, the amount of black in black was reduced to zero. You can see the yellow was unchanged, but the black letters turned white.

I just wanted to increase the amount of black in black. An increase of 10% black made the letters pop out a lot more without altering the yellow around them. (I could have selected only the letters and then used Curves to darken them, but that would have required a lot more work in selecting and refining the selection).

Choosing black from the Selective Color options.

By using the mask, I was able to easily isolate the black letters. And the yellow included in the masked area would not be affected by increasing the amount of black, since Selective Color adjustment layers allow you to pinpoint changes to one color at a time.

The final result, cropped and adjusted.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

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Enrich Black without Affecting Overall Contrast

Adobe’s Camera RAW (ACR) plug-in software — which comes packaged with Photoshop — has some really interesting adjustment options not available in Photoshop itself. When you open an image in ACR, you’re presented with the “Basic” adjustments panel, which includes an image histogram, white balance presets in a pull-down menu, and some exposure adjustment sliders.

Image 1: Basic adjustment panel in Adobe Camera RAW.

These sliders for the most part have equivalents in Photoshop. For example, Exposure and Contrast are ACR adjustment sliders with similar adjustment layers in Photoshop. There are however some really interesting options in ACR that don’t appear in Photoshop, like the Fill Light slider and the Clarity slider.

(Note: Up until the release of Adobe Photoshop CS4, the Vibrance slider was exclusive to ACR, but it’s now an adjustment layer in Photoshop CS4 itself. Vibrance saturates colors that are a little weak, as opposed to Saturation, which saturates all colors linearly across the board).

Back to RAW creativity: I had been seeing really cool images on the web. They looked almost like high dynamic range (HDR) images, but not quite. I could not figure out how to reproduce the effect. The images seemed to be lit from within, almost painterly.

Image 2. Image with an intense effect.

I think I finally figured out how to re-create the look of this photo. Like everything else, I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish this, but this method is pretty easy using the ACR adjustments.

First, open an image in ACR. I am using a RAW image for this tutorial, because this effect seems to work best with the maximum amount of data that a RAW image contains. But it can also work with almost any high-resolution, properly exposed image.

(Note: Did you know you can open more than just RAW files in the Adobe Camera RAW software? Yep! If you use Adobe Bridge, just right click (ctrl+click on a Mac) on an image and choose “Open in Camera Raw.”)

Image 3. RAW image opened in ACR.

Since this effect is definitely not going for photo realism, you could forego corrections like white balance, etc., but it’s just as well to start off with the best image you can. So if your image needs corrections or cleaning up, go for it, but keep in mind that things like color corrections, or noise reduction might be in vain at this point.

Go to the Fill Light slider, which is the fifth slider down. In this case I’ve cranked it way up to 97. Now you’d never normally want to do this. If a photo was so underexposed that it required the fill light to go this high, the result would be a pretty bad image, with a whole lot of noise. Your number will vary of course, but for the most part you are going to be taking the Fill Light very high, so that the image looks very washed out with blown highlights.

Image 4. Turn the Fill Light way up.

Now you’ll want to bring back some of those lost details using the Blacks slider, which lives right under Fill Light. In this image, I’ve increased the Blacks slider up to 100, but I still have a washed out sky, and some blown out detail on the lighter parts of the giraffe and the rocks. I can’t increase the Blacks, so I’ll reduce the Fill Light until I get those details back.

Image 5. Increase the Blacks to recover lost detail.

I still don’t have enough detail back in my image (above). One thing I could experiment with is reducing all that Fill Light I cranked up after I first opened this image in ACR. I brought it down to about 85. Any lower and my effect will start to diminish. Here’s one more ACR option not available directly in Photoshop: Recovery! Just remember, Recovery to the rescue. What Recovery is more or less designed to do is to lower some of your brightest highlights in order to recover lost, or blown-out, detail. It’s a great option that has improved a lot of photos for me. In this case though, Recovery can be invoked to bring back some of the details we (seemingly) obliterated with the Fill Light slider.

Image 6. Here, the Recovery is brought all the way up.

In this image, now you can see the Recovery is way up, and the Fill Light is down just a bit. The bright details are back, and the sky is again blue with pretty well-defined clouds.

Final touch

By adding so much black, we really increased the color saturation. This may be a good time to lower your saturation, while still inside ACR. You definitely don’t want to pull out too much color though. This technique is pretty over the top, so desaturating too much will take away some of the drama. You also may want to decrease the contrast a little bit, either in the ACR Basic Panel, in the ACR Tone Curve panel, or in Photoshop.

Finally, open your image in Photoshop. You will definitely want to apply some noise reduction. Applying the ACR adjustments to such an extreme extent comes with a price: noise. You may also want to apply sharpening, and possible other corrections, now that you’re in Photoshop.

One word of caution: If an image has a lot of very dark areas with clipped shadow detail, the Fill Light slider may turn those dark areas into gray blobs, in which case you may need to try a different image.

Have fun with this technique, experiment, and remember, it’s all undoable!

Image 7: Final image with the ACR technique applied. I reduced overall saturation, darkened the blue sky, and desaturated the greens a bit, all in ACR.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

RAW Creativity

Converting to black and white

1. A color image with the RGB channels palette open

Like most processes in Photoshop, there are about ten different ways to convert a color image to black and white. They all yield different black and whites and offer vastly different ranges of control over the final result. You can simply go to the “Image” menu and choose “Grayscale.” Or you can create a “Black and White” adjustment layer in CS3 that will allow you much control over your conversion. I could go on, but there are a lot of other tutorials on the web on the subject. Instead, I want to share a very simple, yet really dramatic, method for taking the color out of your images.

The RGB color space

Digital cameras produce images in the RGB color space. Very basically, each channel (red, blue, and green) contains information pertaining to the image’s hue (color), saturation (strength of the color), and luminance (or brightness) levels. You can exploit this last property to create desaturated images.

With an image open in Photoshop, open the Channels Palette, which is usually tabbed along with the Layers Palette. If not, go to the Windows pull-down menu and pick “Channels.” The color channels allow you a huge amount of control over your image. For now, click on the first channel, Red.

(Note: By default, the thumbnails of the channels in the Channels Palette will show in black and white. If they are displaying in color, you’ll want to type “ctrl” or “cmnd” plus the “k” key. This will open the Photoshop Preferences dialog box, where you can select “Interface” to change the channel thumbnails to display in black and white).

When you select the red channel, you’ll see your original image displayed with only the information contained in the red channel. It’s completely without color. Now try it with the green channel, and then the blue channel. Your image will be in black and white, with a different look each time.

2. Channels palette open, red channel selected

3. This image was photographed in color. This is the version with only the red channel selected.

4. The same image, with only the green channel selected in the RGB channel palette

5. The same image again, only with the blue channel selected this time

If one of the three desaturated images you create appeals to you, and you want to save it as an independent image,:

• Select the channel you want to use to create your desaturated image.

• Go to the “Image” pulldown menu and choose “Mode.”

• From “Mode,” pick “Grayscale.”

6. Converting to grayscale

Photoshop will ask you if you want to discard the color information. Click yes. You will then be asked if you want to discard the other layers. Click discard.

You will then be left with your black and white image based on whatever color channel you picked. The image has no color now, so only luminance levels need to be displayed, therefore, in the layers palette, there will be only a single layer, grayscale.

Different processing techniques of the original color image can yield dramatically different results when you desaturate:

7. Color image desaturated based on the green channel

8. The same image, desaturated with the help of the blue channel

9. Desaturated image, also based on the blue channel

10. And the original RGB image from which the blue channel was extracted

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

How to Create Black & White Images from a Single RGB Channel