Creating a professional-quality sepia tone

In this movie, I'll demonstrate what has to be the simplest way to create a solid, professional quality sepia tone in Photoshop. And so, we'll be taking this black and white treatment, and converting it into this powerful sepia tone here. So let's see how it works. For starters, I've got this full color photograph. I'll go ahead and Alt+Click on the eye, in front of close couple. And I've added a couple of adjustment layers here. The first is this Channel Mixer layer. And while Channel Mixer is an old school approach. I have to say, it might be my favorite way for distilling black and white photographs.

So, obviously I turned on the Monochrome checkbox. We've got 60% red, subtracting 30% green, and then adding 76% blue. It's a total of 106, with the constant set to negative 1%. That ends up filling out the histogram. On top of that, I've got this curves adjustment layer here. And you can see, that we're just adding a little bit of highlight contrast. All right, so the next step with that Contrast layer selected, is to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, and then click the Black White icon, at the bottom on the Layers panel and choose Solid Color.

And then I'll go ahead and call this layer sepia and click OK. That'll bring up the color picker dialog box, and it'll show the foreground color by default. I'm going to go ahead and set the Hue value to 30 degrees, or raise the Saturation to 45%, and I'll take the Brightness value, pretty high to 80%, and then I'll click OK. So now the thing is, you can dial in any color you want. That's just a suggested color. Then, I"m going to set the Blend Mode in the upper left corner in the Layers panel, from Normal to Multiply, in order to burn those colors in.

Now I really only want to burn the colors into the shadow details. I want to leave the highlights neutral. So I need to add a Density mask. So I'll Alt+Click, or Option+Click on the eye, in front of the close couple layer. And then I'll go over to the Channels Panel, and you can see that we've got the red channel here, which affords us the most contrast, because the couples faces are very bright. Then in the Green channel, the skin tones start to darken. And then in the Blue channel, they get darker still. So we want the channel with the most contrast. That's the Red channel.

I'm going to Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click on that channel, in order to load it as a selection outline. Then I'll switch back to the RGB image, go back to the Layers Panel, turn all the layers back on, by Alt+Clicking or Option+Clicking on the eye in front of close couple. And then, because we want a Density mask as opposed to a Luminance mask, so in other words, we want to mask away the highlights and keep the shadows. You drop down to the Add Layer mask icon, at the bottom of the Layers Panel and you Alter+ Option+Click on it. And, you end up getting this effect here.

And that's pretty much most of the work. The other thing I want to do, is elevate the contrast. Because if you take a look at the final version of the image, you can see that we've got some clarity, that is some darkening that adds weight around the details inside this image. So I'll switch back to the image in progress here, and I will press the Ctrl key or the Cmd key on the Mac, and click on that Layer mask in order to load it up. Then I'll click on the close couple layer, to make it active. And I'll convert it to a Smart Object, by going out to Layer Panel Flyout menu, and choosing Convert to Smart Object.

Or if you load a D key, so you can press Ctrl+Comma or Cmd+Comma on the Mac. And then you want to go out to the Filter menu and choose Other, and then choose High Pass, or again, if you loaded D keys, you can press Shift F10. Inside the High Pass dialogue box, I want you to enter a radius of 12 pixels where this image is concerned. This is a moderate to low resolution image. If you were working in a higher resolution, you would need to experiment with higher radius values, probably at least twice this size, and then click OK. And finally, we want to change the Blend Mode.

Because you can see that we're losing contrast so far. So I'll double click on that little slider icon, to the right of the words High Pass. And I'll switch the mode from Normal to Overlay. And we end up achieving this effect here. And that is all there is to it. If I press the F12 key, you can see that we started with a black and white photograph. And then just a few minutes later, if I press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on a Mac, you can see that we end up with a professional quality sepia tone, with all kinds of lustrous detail, and high impact contrast, here inside Photoshop.