My tip Quick & Easy Sepia Tone Effect tip demonstrated my personal favorite for making a sepia tone image. It uses a twist on a popular method of B&W conversion that uses a pair of Hue/Saturation adjustment layers. This week's tip will go a bit further with toning. We'll use Image | Adjustments | Variations to alter the tone. You'll soon see, you have a lot more options than sepia, too.

I started with a high contrast color image.

Using a pair of Hue/Saturation layers, I made a sepia tone image. The blend mode of the lower Hue/Saturation layer was set to Color. The settings for Master on upper Hue/Saturation layer were set to Hue = 50, Saturation = -20, and Lightness = +5. So far, everything is exactly as I described last week.

The result is a nice sepia tone image. Let's engage in a bit of creative play! We start with Image | Adjustments | Variations.

I am not a fan of Variations for color correction, but I really like it a lot for quickly toning images. In this case, the available options were a bit bright for my taste, so I slid the slider down a notch for the midtones.

If you have never used Variations before, you click on a thumbnail you like and that will become the Current Pick. By adjusting the slider and selecting Shadows, Midtones, Highlights, or Saturation, you can iterate quickly through a range of toning options. Once the Current Pick is to your liking, just click on the OK button.

Here's the result of More Red for the sepia tone . . .

And here's More Yellow . . .

The newest version of the TLR Sepia Tint action set (version 1.0c) includes two actions to get you started. Apply Sepia Tint uses the method described in Quick & Easy Sepia Tone Effect. You can tweak the adjustment layers after the action completes. Add Noise just adds a bit of noise to the image to simulate film grain and give the image a more authentic sepia look.

Enjoy the creative possibilities!

Technorati Tags: Photoshop photo editing b&w printing fine art printing toning sepia effect