Working with Sepia Tones on a Digital Photo

If your sepia tone photos don't look very sepia anymore, or if sun damage or abuse have bleached areas of them, you can digitally restore the sepia-ness to the whole image or just part of it. You can also take a black-and-white photo and make it look like a sepia tone image.

Evening out existing sepia tones

Your sepia tone photo is blotchy. Some of the photo still has those warm sepia tones, but other areas look faded and dull. What to do? Select the faded area; in Paint Shop Pro, choose Effects --> Artistic Effects --> Sepia. This article uses Paint Shop Pro just as an example, by the way; most image editing applications have a similar feature. Even if your particular program doesn't offer it, you may be able to find a third-party effect that you can download off the Internet — a filter for Photoshop, for example.

To use Paint Shop Pro's Sepia Toning dialog box, follow these steps:

1. Select the area that you want to adjust.

You may want to use a freeform Lasso selection tool. Avoid the geometric shape selectors because they make the adjusted area stand out too much.

2. From the main menu, choose Effects --> Artistic Effects --> Sepia.

The Sepia Toning dialog box opens.

3. Use the Amount to Age slider to increase or decrease the amount of sepia that you want to add to the image.

The Before version of the image appears on the left and the After version on the right.

4. When you like how the After version looks, click the Proof button (the big eye) to see the change previewed in your image window.

5. If you're happy with the preview, click OK to apply the changes to your image.

If you're tinkering with a very small area, use the Sepia Toning dialog box zoom tools (located between the Before and After images in the dialog box) to get close enough to judge the effectiveness of your adjustments.

Converting a black-and-white photo to sepia tone

The process of converting a black-and-white photo to sepia tone is virtually identical to the process of evening out the sepia tones in a photo that's already a sepia-tone image. The only difference is that you may have to change the color mode of your image beforehand. If your application (Paint Shop Pro, in this case) sees your image as a true black-and-white or grayscale image, the Sepia command is dimmed in the Effects submenu.

What to do if you're dimmed? Choose Image --> Increase Color Depth. One or more of the submenu's commands (as Figure 1 shows) become available, depending on the photo's current color status. Choose the highest depth level possible because the more color information you add to your image, the more color manipulation you can perform.

After you make this change, the Sepia command becomes available, and you can open the Sepia Toning dialog box and go to work making your black-and-white photo into a fake sepia tone.