Old Black and White Photos Restored … when Turned to Sepia Tone … Look Both Old and New
There's an aesthetic risk in an old, restored black and white photo ; that is, if the photo has no subject matter that says "old," it can lose some of whatever charm comes with looking and actually being old!
Enter SEPIA TONE … a reddish-brown color associated particularly with monochrome photographs of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For example …
The clothing, street lamps, and absence of "motor cars" offer clues to this photo's age … but IMO, the SEPIA TONE nails it!
© A. Mac/A.G.
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Turn your clocks back …
Perfect.
Thanks, Buzz … been doing four-five a day … will post more.
I think the sepia tones nail it, too! Lovely picture! Wish I could see it in real life!
Thanks for sharing and posting!!!
Great photo and the sepia really brings it to life for me.
A.Mac: Were a lot of vintage photos naturally and originally sepia-toned, or was it caused by aging?
A.Mac: Were a lot of vintage photos naturally and originally sepia-toned, or was it caused by aging?
Probably both.
Adding sepia to prints was originally a process to help make the photographs more durable. The brown tint was a byproduct of the treatment and over the years has been associated with the sepia type of photography.
Modern digital technology can create sepia-colored prints without the sepia treatment during processing. Sepia prints can still be created in darkrooms by processing black and white prints with sepia, but the digital method is much easier and less expensive than traditional sepia processing and preferred by many photographers.
FYI: Allegedly, the "toner" was a chemical by-product from Cuttlefish (a swimming marine mollusk that resembles a broad squid, having eight arms and two long tentacles that are used for grabbing prey. Its internal skeleton is cuttlebone, which it uses for adjusting buoyancy) … its "ink" perhaps.
I love those old sepia toned photos.
I wonder-- have there been a lot of attempts to fake photos being old? Taking a picture. maybe just a building without any people or cars, and then trying to pass it off as old by applying sepia toning?
I wonder-- have there been a lot of attempts to fake photos being old? Taking a picture. maybe just a building without any people or cars, and then trying to pass it off as old by applying sepia toning?
It's actually become a kind of "industry"; places like carnivals and shore resorts have stores filled with racks of old costumes (yesteryear stuff) which tourists put on and are photographed in background settings that go with the costume-era.
The prints made from the (digital) photos are offered in sepia tone!
In transforming my restorations to sepia tone, I used to create gradients using several different tints and shades then set the opacity and hope the mix was right by the third or fourth try; these days, many of the photo editing software offers a sepia tone effect (and about a hundred or more others).
It still requires a certain fine tuning, but often it turns out satisfactory, or, needs just a tweak of contrast, brightness or saturation adjustment.
But, all that aside, if the subject matter doesn't reveal the age of the photo, sepia toning a photo taken an hour ago of a guy standing next to his 2016 CRV … doesn't fool too many folks.
I will be posting more of these. If anyone goes to the link under the photo above, (I may regret doing this), when you get to my website, look for the GALLERIES tab and check my "VINTAGE PHOTO RESTORATION" Gallery. You will see among the photos, in some cases, both an early and a new version of the same restoration. Eventually, I'll take the older/inferior version down and leave the better one.
I know some like to see the evolution of these.
NOTE: If you go to the GALLERIES, you might want to view more than one.