Digital Toning question

[thafred]

Hi all,

I had my first assignment last week (well the processing and film gets paid ..rest is advertising 😉 ) and the clients want the pictures Sepia toned.

Since I scanned the Films for digital printing (I keep the silver darkroom for me only 🙂 I thought I´d add a hue in Photoshop with Duotone command.. works nice BUT the problem I have, wich hue does represent Sepia? do you give a courve to the toning? I mean, is there any common Sepia toning hue? since in reality all papers in the wet darkroom react differently? (my AGFA MG RC would become brown/reddish in color)

So, has any of you guys a standard procedure for toning prints in Sepia? or do you recommend a tri- or quadtone?

Have alot to learn about this so please help!

Oh...here´s some of the shots I allready tried to tone:

 

[lZr]

Very nice toning and successful assigment. Bravo.
If you want some sepia idea, download free this amazing program anf play
http://www.optikvervelabs.com/

 

[RML]

In PaintShop Pro I use to colorize at hue: 15, saturation: 25, IIRC.

 

[mrtoml]

Many digital BW printers keep the original greyscale files (I do it this way) and do the sepia tone at the printing stage (eg with advanced black and white mode for Epson printers) or using a BW RIP like Imageprint or Quadtone RIP. This way you can experiment with different printer/RIP settings until you get the tone you want on the paper you want. So it depends on the printing process you are going to use. If you just send these files through a colour printer driver you might not get what you intended.

 

[thafred]

thanks IZr: that plugin looks promising, thou I prefer doing things "by hand" I d cetainly give it a try!

thanks for the suggestion RML

Mark: I totaly forgot to say a word on how I´m going to print! I sadly have no way to print good quality BW inkjet prints (my HP8050 sucks so much a$$) so I´m going to get them developed at a local 1h photo service (frontier on Fuji christal archive). I´ve let them print stuff before (from MF scanns) and am quite satisfied with their quality, it doesn´t come close to optical enlarging (in part to my scanner too..) but sufficent for the untrained eye = look sharp enough and color quite accurate..at least I can tell em to not touch the Auto correction 😉

So anybody got a toning workflow apart from the discussed? or do you guys all tone by feel?

thanks for your great responses so far!

 

[mrtoml]

You could have a look at this article:

http://www.butzi.net/articles/toning.htm