Video:Elements Tutorial: How to Add Sepia Tones to Images

Transcript:Elements Tutorial: How to Add Sepia Tones to Images

Hi, I’m Pelpina, here for About.com. Adding a sepia tone to a photo gives it a nice warm, old-fashioned feeling. In this video, I’ll show you how to add that effect to any image in Photoshop Elements.  

Convert the Image to Black and White

If your original image is in color, like mine,  we’ll have to make it black and white first. That’s easy to do. Just go to enhance, up here, click on adjust color here, and then on remove color. Now your image converted to black and white.  If your original image is in grayscale, we’ll have to convert it too. Just go to image up here, then click mode, and choose RGB color. That’s it.

Add and Adjust the Sepia Tone

Now we can add the sepia tone! To do that, we’ll go to enhance, and we’ll choose adjust color here, then we’ll click on color variations. Then this screen will pop up. On the left here, you have the original image. On the right, there’s a preview of what the image will look like with the effect. 

First, we’ll want to move this slider: the adjust color intensity -- down one notch less than the middle. Then, we’ll have to take away some of the blue colors, to do that - just click on decrease blue, once. Only once. The last step, is to add some red hints to the picture. To do that, just click on increase red once. And as you can see, in our preview image over here, it’s added a nice old-fashioned tint to our picture. Pretty nice, isn’t it! When you’re done, just click OK, and you’re good to go!

Experiment with Sepia Using a Layer

And then one final tip I can personally give you: if you want to experiment with adding color effects, and still keep the original image within the same document (so you can go back and see the difference), just duplicate the original layer, like I’ve done here. 

For more how-to videos on Elements, go to compute.about.com. Thanks for watching!