PSDTOP Blog – Design Tips, Photo Effects, Icon Creation, Special Effects and Links - Design Tips, Photo Effects, Icon Creation, Special Effects, Buttons, Interfaces and Links

There are a lot of methods for imitating different photo effects, but today I’ll tell you how is it possible to tone the picture into sepia and then process it in a way as if it is taken with infrared filter.

Sepia toning consists of processing the colored or black and white picture with chemical influence and getting smooth yellow, brown or red nuances. This process in Photoshop may be got, applying Duotone Mode and by the way it is possible to use any other color instead of brown one.

When taking pictures with infrared filter there are used special films, sensitive to infrared light on which there is reflected the heat emanation of the pictured object. As a result we get a surreal picture on which the cold sky is pictured, for example, with darker nuances, but the tress and live beings, which temperature is much higher – with grey or white colors. The Photoshop can not imitate entirely the effect of infrared film, but applying the appropriate blending mode and adjustment layers, it is possible to get a kind of exterior likeness with infrared picture.

1. The described effects look nice on different pictures, but real effectiveness may be seen on the portraits and landscapes (to make this tutorial I have used Lauterbrunnen thanks to SBA73).

2. Make a click on Green channel on the Channels palette, pressing simultaneously the Cmd (Mac) / Ctrl (PC) button

and save the selection (Select > Save Selection).

Name it green _copy and press OK button.

Then press Cmd+D (Mac) / Ctrl+D (PC) to deselect. The saved selection of the auxiliary channel will be necessary.

3. Our purpose is to get the best black and white picture we can. In this case we’ll use the Lab color mode for the intermediate stage. Apply for the picture the Lab Color Mode, selecting in the menu Image > Mode > Lab Color.

4. Delete the A and B channels on the Channels palette, leaving only the Lightness one.

When the channels are removed, they change the names: if removing for ex. the channel A for the beginning, then channel B will be renamed as Alpha 2.

Delete also Alpha 2 channel, leaving for our work Alpha 1.

5. The picture needs the black and white nuance (Image > Mode > Grayscale).

This double step approach always gives a more interesting color transforming into the grey nuances than transforming the picture right away out of RGB into the Grayscale mode. This way we could save the copy of the channel, represented in the step 2. It could disappear if using the immediate transformation.

6. Now select for the picture the Duotone Mode (Image > Mode > Duotone).

Select the Quadtone in the Type option. This will give the possibility to insert two more ink color and corresponding to them the curve graph.

7. For Quadtone the Ink 1 have Black color

For Ink 2 click the color box (the solid square) and select from Color Libraries the PANTONE solid coated colors – PANTONE 718 C

Ink 3 – 346 C

Ink 4 – 7512 C

8. Click the curve box next to the color ink box and adjust the duotone curve for each ink color.

The default Duotone curve, a straight diagonal line, indicates that the grayscale values in the original image map to an equal percentage of ink. At this setting, a 50% midtone pixel is rendered with a 50% tint of the ink, a 100% shadow is rendered in 100% color, and so on. In the curve graph, the horizontal axis moves from highlights (at the left) to shadows (at the right). Ink density increases as you move up the vertical axis. You can experiment with form of the graph for all ink colors to give your personal effect.

I have made available the quadtone curves used to create this tutorial (you can easy Load this quadtone options from a file), download them here.(1KB, .ado)

9. Get back to the Layers Palette and Duplicate Layer (Cmd+J (Mac) / Ctrl+J (PC)).

Blur it out with Gaussian Blur filter out of the menu Filter > Blur,

giving it the radius of 4 px.

Change the Blending mode of the new blurred layer on Overlay with Opacity – 60%.

Duplicate blurred layer.

10. Make a copy of the quadtone layer – Duplicate Layer (Cmd+J (Mac) / Ctrl+J (PC)) and move it on the Layers Palette on the top list. Change its Opacity – 60% and give it the Screen blending mode.

11. If the picture is too dark, then we may minimize the Opacity of the blurred layers.
12. The work may be considered finished. Give it the RGB mode (Image > Mode > RGB)

13. Get back to the green_copy channel from our second step made. The greenness of the trees and grass is usually warmer than the surrounding stones and sky. That is why on the real infrared pictures it looks lighter. Hold Cmd (Mac) / Ctrl (PC) button and then make a click on the Channels Palette on Green copy.

After that represent a new adjustment layer – Create new fill or adjustment layer > Invert.

Change its Blending mode on Exclusion and change the Opacity -60%.

That’s all!

No related posts.