Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Warm Toning

I used to love the sepia toning on photos, like love love it.  I'm not that big a fan of it anymore, a lot of photos with it seem too cheesy or too monochromatic (in the same boat with the too grey black and white).

So I set out to get a photo style that still had sepia toning, but allowed some color through.

As I was going back through my screenshots there were a few places where I could see that the photo could be left alone right there and it would be great, so this could be 3 different processing techniques in one.



beforeandafter

Open the photo you want to tone in your editor.  Do all adjustments now (you know: levels, eye sharpening, cloning, etc).  Then make a hue/saturation adjustment layer.  Click colorize and move the hue slider to a brown color (anywhere between 25 and 40).  If you stop at this point you've got a sepia toned photo.

Untitled-2

I'm going to change the blend mode to screen.  I like the way this looks, washed out but still toned, I like the bit of lowered contrast too.  If you lose too much detail dial back the opacity some.  Again, you could stop right here.

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To add back a little of that contrast you're going to stamp visible and change the blend to overlay.  Stamp visible, what tha?  Ok, you get there by pressing alt+ctl+shift+e, and all of the visible layers merge and it makes a new layer of what you're flattened image would look like (pretty cool, huh?).  Play with opacity.

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Stamp Visible again and this time set it to multiply, this is going to darken the photo and bring out some more color.
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Now add a texture if you feel froggy.  I used Aged Wood from Shadowhouse Creations, set it to soft light and lowered the opacity.  It gives the photo a nice vignette and grit.

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The toned photo:

benwcam

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