Converting Color Photo to Sepia Tone??

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I am working on a photo for the Boothbay Railway Village model RR web pages. It is showing a 1930s vintage mixed train. I want to convert it from color to sepia tone. I am using Adobe Photoshop Elements, but do not see a Filter that makes this change. I have found the filter that converts to B&W, but like the sepia better. Can someone give me some advise on how this is done?? Thanks

2

George,

The sepia feature is what you want to use. It mimics a faded or aged b&w picture. I’m surprised that’s not an option in the Adobe Elements software, which - IIRC - is a stripped-down version of Photoshop.

The one thing you could add is a few “blemishes” or a ripped or dog-eared corner. Not sure if there’s a feature for that. You’d probably have to freelance that.

Tom

3

I did a search for “sepia tone in elements” and found some answers.

Ed

4

I used Photoshop in several different versions for 15 years. Now retired and non limited budget, I use Photoshop Elements. I assumed it had a “just click it” sepia button. Apparently not. But it’s not too hard.

I opened my Photoshop Elements and clicked “help” and it loaded a help program (took a minute). On the help program, I asked for “sepia” and got a page showing 7 different ways to get a sepia effect. The help page seems to mix together procedures from several different versions and releases of Photoshop and may be confusing, give you more variations than may be necessary to wade through.

One fairly quick and easy procedure:

  1. Load the photo you want to “sepia-ize” into Photoshop. Go to “Enhance” > Convert to black and white. You may want to “SAVE AS” with a different name than your original to preserve the original. Say your original is GoneLoco.jpg, save the modified picture as GoneLocoBW.jpg, or maybe as GonoLocoSep.jpg since you are going to make it a sepiatone pretty quick.

  2. Go to “Layer” > copy layer. Now you have the same b&w image on 2 layers. You can fiddle around with one while keeping the other right under it for a later step.

  3. Working on the top layer, Go to Enhance> Adjust color> Hue/Saturation. In that pane, there is a place to click “colorize” which gives a color cast to the layer. The particular color cast is dependent on the HUE slider. Slide it back and forth til the color looks a little like what you think sepia tone should look, usually one of the reds. You may want to adjust saturation and brightness too… Experiment. It should be STARTING to look like a sepiatone.

  4. Finally, go to the transparency/opacity thing with the layers on the right bottom part of the screen. Clicking on it opens a slider which adjusts transparency between

5

You could try the Windows Photo editor. It is free or possibly already on your computer. It has that option.

6

Thanks for the help, I will try leighant’s procedure.

I did take a look at MovieMaker; it does have a one click sepia feature, then you end up with a “movie” of a still picture. [%-)]

7

Or use iPiccy.com It’s an online photo editor with heaps of effects including adjustable sepia.

8

There is a reason that “Elements” is much cheaper than the full version of Photoshop. They left a lot of stuff out. They did, however, leave a lot of stuff in. Many things that are the click of a button in Photoshop take many steps in Elements, but most of them are doable. You have a pretty good set of instructions posted already.

Post the photo here and perhaps some angel who has the full version will do it for you.

9

I used Picture It! Express, which, I think, came with my computer. It’s a very simple (luckily for me) picture editing programme, although it doesn’t offer a sepia-tone option. It does, however, offer Black & White. To make a sepia-tone photo (mine aren’t intended to be sepia-tone, but merely aged somewhat) I simply go to “EFFECTS” and click to convert the photo to b&w. Next, I click on “TOUCH-UP” and select “ADJUST TINT”. This option lets you select a from a spectrum of colours and then select a percentage of the colour you’ve chosen. It changes the b&w to a tinted b&w. I usually use yellow and red, added in that order, with yellow to age the photo and red to add a semi-sepia effect. You can undo any of these steps before moving on to the next one. Once I have the tones I want, I select “BRIGHTNESS & CONTRAST” (also in the “TOUCH-UP” section), and separately adjust each, usually brightening the photo somewhat, then decreasing the contrast slightly. For sepia-tone photos, simply play around with the colour proportions until you get a look which you like, then note the percentages of each so you can duplicate the effect anytime.

As far as I know, the Express version of this programme is a free download, while the full version will cost you.

Here are a few examples:

[IMG]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b399/doctorwayne/locos%20switching%20industries/Copyo

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FastStone is freeware and quite good for rudimentary pp of images. It does a good job of sepia.

Crandell

11

Just email it to me, I have the adobe master collection and own all of the adobe programs pretty much, and I’d be more than happy to convert some photos for you

Just let me know if you still need photos coconverted

matthew