Last week's "Tip of the Week" demonstrated my personal favorite for making a sepia tone image. It uses a twist on a popular method of B&W conversion that uses a pair of Hue/Saturation adjustment layers. This week's tip will go a bit further with toning. We'll use Image | Adjustments | Variations to alter the tone. You'll soon see, you have a lot more options than sepia, too.

I started with a high contrast color image.

Using a pair of Hue/Saturation layers, I made a sepia tone image. The blend mode of the lower Hue/Saturation layer was set to Color. The settings for Master on upper Hue/Saturation layer were set to Hue = 50, Saturation = -20, and Lightness = +5. So far, everything is exactly as I described last week.

The result is a nice sepia tone image. Let's engage in a bit of creative play! We start with Image | Adjustments | Variations.

I am not a fan of Variations for color correction, but I really like it a lot for quickly toning images. In this case, the available options were a bit bright for my taste, so I slid the slider down a notch for the midtones.

If you have never used Variations before, you click on a thumbnail you like and that will become the Current Pick. By adjusting the slider and selecting Shadows, Midtones, Highlights, or Saturation, you can iterate quickly through a range of toning options. Once the Current Pick is to your liking, just click on the OK button.

Here's the result of More Red for the sepia tone . . .

And here's More Yellow . . .

The newest version of the TLR Sepia Tint action set (version 1.0c) includes two actions to get you started. Apply Sepia Tint uses the method described in last week's tip. You can tweak the adjustment layers after the action completes. Add Noise just adds a bit of noise to the image to simulate film grain and give the image a more authentic sepia look.

Click here to download the TLR Sepia Tint action set.

Enjoy the creative possibilities!