Tutorial: Sepia Toning of Digital Images

Sepia Toning

Sepia toned images appears in shades of brown rather then black and white. Many old photos are sepia toned. In the traditional chemical darkroom, sepia toning is a complicated process that involves replacing the silver in the photo print with silver sulphide. This produces a brown toned substance.

With Photoshop (and most other image editors) you can sepia tone an image in minutes and try out different toning techniques without using chemicals. Photoshop will replace grays with browns (or other colors that you choose) giving a nice, warm, aged feel to the image.

As usual, you should always work on a copy of your image files. If you save the toned image we will create below using the same file name as the original file, your original color image will be lost.

First, you need to convert your image to grayscale. In this example, we will simply change the image mode to greyscale using the Image menu. Note that there are other great ways to convert an image to black and white. We use simple greyscale conversion here (even though it might not produce the best results) for simplicity.

• Image -> Mode -> Grayscale

Second, make the image duo-, tri-, or quad-toned using:

• Image -> Mode -> Duotone...

This should bring up the duotone dialog box, which is shown below. From there you can select duo-tone, tritone, or quadtone. The image shown here was created using a tritone type. On the right side of the dialog box you should see "Ink 1", "Ink 2", "Ink 3", and "Ink 4" (depending whether you chose duotone, tritone, or quadtone one or more of the "Ink" sections may be disabled.) To the left of the "Ink" labels, you will see four curves. Click on the first one, this first section should cover the very blackest sections of your image. Manipulate the curve until only the shadows are black. After that, click the next curve, this will be the darker browns. Drag the curve down slightly so it dips in the middle slightly (unless your image is duotone in which case it should raise slightly to cover more of the lights). Then click the color beside "Ink 2". Select a dark brown from the menu that appears.

In a duotone image, this would be all you would do. In a tritone image make one more color that represents the light section of your image. Select the curve and make it cover most of the remaining white in the image. By dragging it up in the middle. Finally, select the color menu for "Ink 3" and select a tan or light brown from the menu. Some experimentation is in order here. try different colors, different curve shapes to achieve radically different effects. When you find settings that you like, you can store them for repeated use using the "Save..." button in the toning dialog box.

Duotone Dialog Box	Original Color Image (click image for a full-sized version in a new window)	Tri-toned Image

Some helpful links on sepia toning:

• Wikipedia -- The wikipedia article on sepia toning images.
• Ephotozine -- A good website for more conventional sepia toning methods.