Sepia With Photoshop
I have had a couple of emails asking how I achieved the Sepia effect in Photoshop for the two images in my Lomo post. Rather than reply to those emails I thought I would share the technique here. It’s nothing revolutionary and with everything PS there’s more than one way to do it. You need Photoshop CS or better as the “Photo Filter” is used for the final step.
First up, the warnings. If you’re a seasoned PS person then these will be second nature.
1. Always work on a copy of the image, not the original. Either “Duplicate” in PS or store a copy elsewhere on your machine.
2. Work with layers. It makes it much easier to adjust settings down the line. Most adjustments can be done with layers especially the Channel Mixer, Levels and Photo Filters.
3. Save regularly! I hate nothing more than when PS crashes (which it does!) losing even 30 minutes of work.
Click any of the thumbnails for a larger version. All photos are copyright Collin French 2007.
Select your image. I am going to use one that I took at a recent wedding. It’s not the best photo in the world but does for this example. The drainpipe on the wall is coming out from between the couple, the leaf on the left is bloody annoying and worst of all I got camera shake and blurred the image. The photo was taken with a Canon EOS 20d with Canon 70-200L lens.
The first thing I do is to convert to mono. There are a variety of ways to do this, but I was shown this method a few days ago and love it. On your layers palette click the black and white circle and select “Channel Mixer”. In the box that appears leave the Output Channel as Red and in the bottom click “Monochrome”. Your image may look crap. Next type in the following into the “%” boxes:
Red: 50
Green: 30
Blue: 20
Your image should have changed slightly. Play with these numbers to get something that looks pleasing to the eye. The rule to remember is that the three numbers should add up to 100 (for 100%!). Once you are happy with what you see on the screen click “OK”.
This will give you a mono image similar to the one on the left. Again, click the image for a larger version. Still with me? Good. We’re just going to the last (and just as easy!) step.
Again, in your layers palette click the black and white circle. This time select “Photo Filter”. Have a scroll through all the different effects that are listed and see the different effects. The one we’re interested in this time is “Sepia”. Select that and set the Density at 80%. I have found this works well for most photos, but again you can select whatever you think looks best.
The result should be something like this:
So, not hard eh! What do you think? Have you a better technique? Let me know if you try this!
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