Most toners work by replacing the metallic silver in the emulsion with a silver compound, such as silver sulfide Ag 2 S in the case of sepia toning. The compound may be more stable than metallic silver and may also have a different color or tone. Different toning processes give different colors to the final print.
In some cases, the printer may choose to tone some parts of a print more than others. Toner also can increase the range of shades visible in a print without reducing the contrast.
Selenium toning is especially effective in this regard. Some toning processes can improve the chemical stability of the print, increasing its potential longevity. Other toning processes, such as those including iron and copper, can make the print less stable. Many chemical toners are highly toxic, some even containing chemicals that are carcinogenic. It is therefore extremely important that the chemicals be used in a well ventilated area, and rubber gloves and face protection should be worn when handling them.
Selenium toning is a popular archival toning process, converting metallic silver to silver selenide. In a diluted toning solution, selenium toning gives a red-brown tone, while a strong solution gives a purple-brown tone. The change in color depends upon the chemical make-up of the photographic emulsion being toned. Chloro-bromide papers change dramatically, whilst pure bromide papers change little.
Fibre-based papers are more responsive to selenium toning. Selenium toning may not produce prints quite as stable as sepia or gold toning. Recently, doubts have surfaced as to the effectiveness of selenium toner in ensuring print longevity. Sepia toning is a specialized treatment to give a black-and-white photographic print a warmer tone and to enhance its archival qualities. The metallic silver in the print is converted to a sulfide compound, which is much more resistant to the effects of environmental pollutants such as atmospheric sulfur compounds.
Except for polysulfide toners, sepia toning is done in three stages. First the print is soaked in a potassium ferricyanide bleach to re-convert the metallic silver to silver halide. The print is washed to remove excess potassium ferricyanide, and then immersed into a bath of toner, which converts the silver halides to silver sulfide. Incomplete bleaching creates a multi-toned image with sepia highlights and gray mid-tones and shadows.
This is called split toning. By default, the Balance slider sits halfway between the shadows and highlights, but as we drag the slider towards the left, moving it into the darker areas, we shift the balance of the image in favor of the shadow color.
In other words, the shadow color will begin to reach more and more into the brighter tones as well. If we dragged the Balance slider all the way to the left, we'd effectively tint the entire image with the shadow color, but we don't need to go quite that far. I'll drag my Balance slider roughly halfway towards the left, giving me a value of around And now, the sepia effect has been applied not only to the darkest tones but also to lighter areas as well. Only the very brightest areas in the image remain in grayscale:.
When you're happy with the look of your image, click the OK button in the lower right corner of the dialog box to accept your settings and close out of the Camera Raw filter:. If you recall from back in Step 1, before we applied the Camera Raw filter to the image, we first converted the Background layer into a Smart Object.
This allowed the Camera Raw filter to be added as a Smart Filter , and if we look once again in the Layers panel, we can see the Camera Raw filter listed as a Smart Filter below the image. This means that our sepia tone effect is actually completely separate from the image itself. We can toggle the effect on and off simply by clicking the small visibility icon the "eyeball" icon to the left of the filter's name.
Click the icon once to turn the effect off and revert to the original image. Click it again to turn the sepia effect back on. You can also double-click directly on the name "Camera Raw Filter" to re-open the filter's dialog box if needed and edit your settings:. And there we have it! That's how to easily apply a classic sepia tone to an image non-destructively using the Camera Raw filter in Photoshop CC Creative Cloud! Check out our Photo Retouching section for more Photoshop image editing tutorials!
Any areas originally containing yellow are now lighter after dragging the Yellows slider. The Sepia filter is primarily changing the color of the bright image areas, the Cyanotype effect does not tint the bright areas so strongly, but is changing the colors of shadows more. So I moved the green curve slightly away from the black point - the shadows are now strongly purple, while the highlights are still white or of a neutral gray. User profile for user: Apple Watch Speciality level out of ten: How to Create a Sepia Tone Effect by: To set this color balance do the following: First, remove the saturation completely, by dragging the saturation slider in the Color adjustment section all the way to the left to If you leave a little saturation,
Sepia is a reddish-brown color, named after the rich brown pigment derived from the ink sac of Sepia tones are used in photography; the hue resembles the effect of aging in old photographs, and of older photographs chemically treated. In photography, toning is a method of changing the color of black-and-white photographs. In most applications, selenium toning was not used for its sepia or red tone by fine art photographers. In fact it was used for the opposite of those .