Digital Home Thoughts: Image Editing Tutorial - Sepia Toning

"There are plenty of tutorials out there showing you how to restore old photos, but what if you want to do the exact opposite? How can you take a modern full-colour digital photograph and make it look like it was shot 60 years ago? The classic look for old photographs is something called "sepia toning". Sepia toned photographs have a distinctive yellow-brown colour. It was popular up until at least the 1920s, so you've probably seen examples of it in old photo albums. Any photos of your grandparents or great-grandparent in their youth will probably be sepia toned. Here's a photo of my grandfather taken in Cologne in 1918, during the allied occupation at the end of the first world war. It's a little battered, but it is 90 years old and he did carry it in the pocket of his uniform for a few years."

Oh man, this article brings back so many fond memories. My very first digital camera was a Sony (can't really remember the model but I so vividly remember the look and feel) back in 1999. And of course, being the gadget geek that I am, as soon as I had it in my hands, the first thing I did was to play with every possible option. It wasn't like there were that many, but one of the ones that I did learn about was shooting in Sepia mode. I remember taking so many pictures in that mode because I found those automatically artistic shots to be so much fun. This article provides step-by-step instructions on how one can go about creating this effect in your digital darkroom, specifically Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.