Photoshop - Sepia color

Photoshop is not just for improving images - it's all about image manipulation and here we show how to turn a photo into one of those "Victorian-type" sepia prints. The name comes from the fact that cuttlefish ink was used to dye the images.

1. Open up any suitable image or right-click and copy the image to the right. If you choose to do it this way, it's on your PCs clipboard and, if you switch straight into Photoshop and press FILE...New the dialog box will be set as the exact dimensions of the image. So go to EDIT...Paste and you're ready to go.

2. It's important that you have the image in the right mode for the rest to work, so go to IMAGE...Mode and make sure it's RGB if you require the finished image for on-screen purposes (usually for putting on a Website), or CMYK for printing out.

Incidentally, if it's a color image, we need to first change it to black and white, so go to IMAGE...Desaturate.

3. The next step is entirely optional, but it usually doesn't do any harm to give the image a bit of roughness, so in the second example we went to FILTER...Noise...Add Noise. You'll get a preview as you adjust the slider, so you be the judge.

4. Now go to IMAGE...Adjustments...Hue/Saturation and, with the "Colorize" box checked enter 40 for the Hue and 25 for the Saturation.

Looks good, eh? The final image on the far right benefitted from being feathered - an important technique if you're collaging more than one image.