The Sepia Toning filter

Once we’ve removed all the colour from a photo, quite naturally, the next thing we want to do is put some back in. PSP’s Sepia Toning filter can be found on the Photo Effects sub-menu of the Effects menu. You can use it on colour photos, or photos from which the colour has been removed using the techniques in the previous tutorial..

To Use Sepia Toning select Effects>Photo Effects>Sepia Toning. Adjust the ‘Amount to Age’ or, as I like to call it, strength slider to your taste and click OK. The Sepia Toning filter is easy to use, but it’s a bit of a blunt instrument. You can have any colour you like – as long as it’s sepia and if you use it directly on a colour photo you have no control over the tonal rendition it can often produce rather muddy looking results.

Press Ctrl-Z to undo the Sepia Toning filter

Three other ways ways to tint photos

Colorize

For quick and easy tinting, Colorize probably offers the best trade off between flexibility and ease of use. You can apply Colorize directly to colour or mono (but not greyscale) photos. To open the Colorize dialogue box select Adjust>Hue and Saturation>Colorize (or press Shift-L). Check the Preview on Image box, drag the hue slider to change the tint colour and the saturation slider to change the strength of the tint. That’s all there is to it.

Hue/Saturation/lightness

Hue Saturation/Lightness works in a very simialr fashion to Colorize, in fact Colorize is really just a simpler implementation of the Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialogue box which you can open by selecting Adjust>Hue and Saturation>Hue/Saturation/lightness. Check the colorize box to apply an overall tint, adjust the tint colour with the Hue slider and the amount using the saturation slider.

While we’re on the subject of Hue/Saturation/Lightness and Colorize I should also mention that you can also use either of these to produce mono images from colour ones – just drag the saturation slider to zero. I wouldn’t recommend it though as you don’t have any control over the tones – it produces the same ‘average’ values as Image>Greyscale.

If you start out with a colour image, you can run in to the same problems with muddy tones that we experienced when using image>greyscale to convert to mono – you have no control over the tonal rendition. One way around this is to first create your mono image using the Channel mixer, then tone it.

Colour Balance

Ordinarily, Colour balance is used to remove casts from colour images. These casts might arise for all sorts of reasons – you might have set the white balance incorrectly on you camera, or there might just be a preponderance of light of a particular colour in the scene. You can also use Colour Balance to tint mono photos.

Here’s a photo that I’ve already converted to mono using the channel mixer. To open the Colour Balance dialog box select Colour Balance from the Adjust menu. This is pretty simple – you just drag the slider to the right to introduce warm tones into the image or to the left to introduce cool tones. The further you drag, the stronger the tint.

You can extend the range of tones available by clicking the advanced checkbox. The simplest way to use these controls is to stick to the bottom two temperature and tint sliders. Use the top one as before to introduce warm or cool tints and the bottom one to make the image more green or purple.

By all means experiment with the top sliders, they can produce some interesting tint effects, but they are not that intuitive because they’re designed for removing casts from full colour images and not for tinting mono ones.

Adjustment layers

If you haven’t used them before you should aquaint yourself with adjustment layers. These allow you to apply some image adjustments in a non-destructive way and have many other advantages, some of which we’ll discover shortly.

Ordinarily, when you apply a global adjustment to a layer, let’s say you make a Levels adjustment, or convert a photo to mono using the Channel Mixer, the pixel values in that layer are altered for good. If you later decide that the adjustment wasn’t such a good idea, it’s too late to do anything about it, unless you used an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers apply global adjustments to underlying layers.

The available adjustment layers are:

Brightness/contrast
Channel Mixer
Colour Balance
Curves
Hue/Saturation/lightness
Invert
Levels
Posterize
Threshold

Adjustment layers are saved along with the file and, just like other layers, you can you can turn them off, delete them, or make changes to the settings at any time. This provides a great deal of editing flexibility.

Using a channel mixer adjustment layer

Open a new image and select New Adjustment layer>Channel Mixer from the Layers palette menu. This channel mixer dialogue box works in exactly the same way as the earlier one but there are some additional adjustment layer features we won’t go into right now. The Source channel sliders can be found on the Adjustment tab, drag them as before to produce the desired tonal results and click OK

Just as before, you can create a desaturated image, this time by altering the opacity of the Channel Mixer adjustment layer – drag the opacity slider in layer palette. To toggle the Adjustment layer on and off click the layer visibility icon (the eye to the left of the layer thumbnail) and if you want to change the Channel Mixer setting at any time double-click the Adjustment Layer thumbnail to open the Channel Mixer dialog box.

You can also use an adjustment layer to tint the image. Make sure the top layer (Channel Mixer 1) is selected in the layers palette and select Layers>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Check the Preview on Image and colorize boxes and drag the saturation slider up to around 20. Now drag the Hue slider to change the tint colour.

The channel mixer adjustment layer provides your image with the best possible range of tones and the HSL adjustment layer provides the precise colour tint and strength. As before, you can alter the strength of the effect by changing the opacity of the adjustment layer. You can also change the blend mode (try colur dodge and burn) to produce some interesting graphic effects.

Using a Colour Balance adjustment layer

We’re now going to use a different process to tint a monochrome image produced using a channel mixer adjustment layer. First, here’s another neat trick with adjustment layers that will save you a lot of time. Open a new colour image in PSP and bring the one you’ve just been working on to the front. Drag the Channel Mixer 1 layer from the Layers palette and drop it onto the new image. The new image now has the exact same channel mixer adjustments applied to it as the old one.

Next, select Layers>New Adjustment Layer>Colour Balance. Check the Preview on Image box and, if it isn’t displayed, click the Adjustment tab. You’ll notice immediately that dialogue box for a colour balance adjustment layer bears very little resemblance to the one you get when you select Colour Balance from the Adjust menu. This one isn’t just more useful for applying tints to mono images, it’s better all round and I’d recommend you use it in preference to Adjust>colour balance, whatever your attempting.

The Adjustment tab has three sliders, one labelled Cyan/Red another labelled Meganta/Green and a third labelled Yellow/Blue. Drag the top slider to the right towards Red to produce a red tint.

You can use the sliders in any combination to produce different coloured tints, just be aware that adding equal amounts of Red, green and blue, or Yellow magenta and cyan will cancel each other out (try dragging all three sliders fully to the left or right and you’ll see what I mean).

A Colour Balance adjustment layer can be used to create split toning effects – applying different colours to different tonal ranges, the shadows and highlights for example.

Underneath the colour sliders you’ll see three radio buttons labelled Shadows, midtones and highlights which allow you to confine adjustments to these tonal ranges.

First, reset all the sliders to zero, then check the Shadows box, then drag the Cyan/Red slider to around the 50 mark. Now check the highlights radio box and drag the Yellow/Blue slider to around 50 blue. You now have a split-toned image with the shadow detail predominantly Red and the highlights predominantly blue. Experiment with the base colours and percentages to achieve the effect you want. Depending on the nature of your photo you can sometimes add a third colour to the midtones. Click the OK button when you like what you see.

Here’s one last method for producing a split-toned image. It doesn’t use adjustment layers, so it isn’t quite as flexible as the previous one, but it provides a lot more control over where the colour goes.

Here, I’ve reverted to the original colour image, duplicated the background layer twice. I’ve then applied the channel mixer directly to convert both of the duplicate layers to mono and renamed the lower one red and the upper one blue

Select the red layer and apply a red tint to it using any of the methods described earlier, I’ve done it using Colorize. Similarly, apply a a blue tint to the blue layer.

Now double-click the blue layer thumbnail in the layers palette to open the Layer Properties dialogue box. Check the Preview on Image box and select the Blend Ranges tab.Select Grey Channel from the Blend Channel pull-down menu and drag the top slider in the top grey ramp labelled ‘This layer’ to about the mid point.

What’s happing here is that you are masking pixels in the upper (blue) layer so that the red layer below shows through. The masked pixels are those in the tonal range defined by the slider, currently from mid-tone grey to black. As you drag the slider further to the right progressively more and more of the tonal range – eventually right into the highlights will be masked revealing the red layer beneath. The bottom slider controls smoothness, the closer you drag it to the top one the more abrupt the change from one layer, or colour to the other.

You can use this technique with multiple layers to produce tri and quad-tone effects.