Creative Use of Color - Beginning Photo Retouching and Restoration Using GIMP - page 119

Figure 5-8. Before and after comparison

Digital Sepia Toning
GIMP can effectively emulate the effect of sepia toning. In the traditional darkroom method, a chemical
process is used on silver-based black-and-white photographic prints to give them a warm, brownish tone.
Many photographs from the late 1800s and early 20th century are sepia toned. There are several ways to
digitally apply a sepia tone using GIMP. We'll look at two in this chapter.
In the way that some images lend themselves to conversion from color to black and white, some can
also be enhanced (or just given an artistic element) by applying a sepia tone. It works well with images such
as the church we worked with previously. Like conversion to black and white, sepia toning seems to take an
image back in time.

Tutorial 18: Converting Color to Sepia (No. 1)
We're going to work with the same image of the church that was converted to black and white in the previous
tutorial. This first method is a very easy and quick way to produce a sepia tone.
To convert this image, follow these steps:

Open the image ( Ch5_old church ) found in the Practice Images folder.

1.

2. Duplicate the background layer (Shift + Control + D) and rename it Sepia Layer.

Open the Colorize dialog box (Image Menu ➤ Colors ➤ Colorize) and set the
Hue slider to a value of about 30 and the Saturation to around 40 (Figure 5-9 ) and
click OK. If you decide you don't like the results, just undo the effect (Control + Z)
and start over.