Sepia tone

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This article is about the digital effect. For the chemical process, see Photographic print toning.

Sepia tone refers to the coloring of a black and white photographic print that has been toned with a sepia toner to simulate the faded brownish color of some early photographs. This process can be simulated using a computer and digital photo-editing software.

1 Digital sepia tones
2 Sepia tones in pop culture
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Digital sepia tones

Sepia can be produced in many digital cameras and camcorders, or it can be produced in the digital darkroom.

Software, such as Photoshop or The GIMP, offers control over the sepia achieved (there is no single color known as “sepia”—the term covers a range of yellow and brown mixtures). Simpler photo-editing software usually has an option to sepia tone an image in one step.

More sophisticated software tends to implement sepia tones using the duotone feature.

Adobe recommends setting Hue = 27 and Saturation = 21 and checking the Colorize box in the Hue/Saturation filter in Photoshop^[1]
Microsoft recommends:^[2]

R' = (R × 0.393 + G × 0.769 + B × 0.189); G' = (R × 0.349 + G × 0.686 + B × 0.168); B' = (R × 0.272 + G × 0.534 + B × 0.131);

The sample photographs below show the process of removing color from a photograph, then applying a conversion to grayscale. The third sample photograph shows the colored photograph converted to sepia.

Color image

Grayscale image

Sepia-toned image

[edit] Sepia tones in pop culture

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Sepia-toned images are associated with period photography of the 1800s and "that old-time feel". Many photographs of the American Old West were recorded in sepia tones, particularly Edward Weston's photos of Carmel.

The Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz were in sepia tone, until Technicolor takes over in the land of Oz. Wings of Desire, by Wim Wenders, is filmed in sepia mostly, to depict that the movie protagonists, invisible angels, lack the usual human senses; when the angels are not present, the movie is shown in full colour. Jaws The Revenge integrates footage from the first film in the series, which is sepia-toned to indicate that they are flashbacks.

The Penny Arcade webcomic characters Twisp and Catsby appear mainly in sepia-toned comic strips.

Jack Johnson's song "Better Together" references Sepia Tone in the line, "Like a shoebox of photographs with sepia tone loving".