Sepia tone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sepia tone is a type of monochrome photographic image in which the picture appears in shades of brown, as opposed to grayscale as in a black-and-white image.

Sepia images tend to fall into two categories:

Very old photographic prints, or
Digital images that undergo a process ( described below ) converting to grayscale, then sepia

1 History
2 Digital sepia tones
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

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Beginning in the 1880s, sepia was produced by adding a pigment made from the Sepia cuttlefish to the positive print of a photograph. The chemical process involved converts any remaining metallic silver to a sulphide which is much more resistant to breakdown over time. This is why many old photographs are sepia toned—those are the ones that have survived until today.

Although sepia toning began as a printing method, today it is seen as a genre, much like black and white photography.

[edit] Digital sepia tones

Many compact digital cameras and camcorders have a "sepia mode," although sometimes photographers prefer to capture an image in color and convert it later. This is because digital cameras don't usually have a lot of control over this function, while an image editing program would have more options on how to effectively tint the image. In Photoshop, for example, this is done using the duotone feature, found under the Image and Modes menus. Simpler photo-editing software usually has an option to sepia tone an image in one step.

The sample photographs below show the action of taking a colour photograph and applying a conversion to grayscale. The last sample photograph shows the same coloured photograph converted to sepia tone.