Making a Photo Look Sepia-Toned

by Barbara Snyder

Changing your photo to sepia, or how to colorize your photo.

Start by opening your picture in PSE2. Always make a duplicate image and close your original.

Make a duplicate layer by right-clicking on the background layer in the layers palette:

Choose "duplicate layer" and then choose okay on the box that pops up. You may choose to rename the layer as to the filter/effect, etc. you are going to apply.

Click on Enhance in the upper horizontal tool bar and then Adjust Color--Hue/Saturation.
A new box will open that looks like this:

You may start with the values shown on the picture, but make sure you have the colorize and previews boxes checked so you can see what the finished product will look like.
Slide the sliders to achieve the look you want. You may want it to be lighter, or purple or quite saturated. You can achieve some really beautiful or quite crazy looking effects by just playing around with the sliders.

Making your photo look old

Here are some ideas for making your photo look old:

FILTER--TEXTURE--Craquelure
I added a craquelure texture to a duplicate layer. Duplicate the sepia layer. So that the face would not have the texture applied to it, I selected the face by using my elliptical marquee tool (in the tool palette), giving it a feather of about 30px, so the edges would
be soft. I also chose anti-aliased and style: normal from the tool bar that appears in the upper horizontal tool. Then I did Select--Inverse to choose the background and applied Filter--Craquelure with the following settings applied: crack spacing (61), crack depth (6),
and crack brightness (10).

FILTER--TEXTURE--Grain
I also created some texture by creating a new layer, filled it with white
and applied Filter--Texture--Grain--Horizontal and adjusted the settings to Intensity 89 and Contrast 90. Adjust the look as you like, and then adjust the opacity of the layer to suit you.

FILTER--ARTISTIC--FILM GRAIN
This filter will give you an overexposed and grainy texture. Create a duplicate image of the sepia layer and apply Filter--Artistic--Film Grain. Adjust for the effect you want to achieve.

BRUSHES
I created a few new layers and applied some of my grungy brush work to each of the layers and adjusted the opacity of each layer till it looked "real".

SELECTION BRUSH
I also made areas that look washed out by creating a duplicate image of the sepia layer. I chose the selection brush from the tool palette, and chose a large soft brush with about50% hardness. I painted areas at the corners of the page, and using Enhance--Adjust Color--
Hue/Saturation, I desaturated those areas by sliding the saturation slider. You may want to create darker areas on your photo, too, by making another layer and selecting a different portion of the photo and increasing the saturation of the new selection.

Enjoy using this tutorial and creating your own colorized and artistically edited photos!