Toning Monochrome Images

In the days of darkroom photography, many photographers toned their B&W photographs for various reasons ranging from aesthetics to archival qualities. Compare the opening images by moving the slider in color and platinum-toned monochrome versions. They evoke different feelings, at least for me. Let’s move on …

Reasons for Toning Images

Aesthetics and Added Color

Toning allowed photographers to modify the tonal qualities of a black-and-white print. While traditional black-and-white prints are created using silver salts with gray or neutral colors, toning could shift the color of the print to warm or cool hues.

Print Durability

Toning, particularly with selenium or gold, could make photographic prints more resistant to fading and deterioration. Silver in prints is prone to oxidation and fading over time. The toning process replaces some or all of the silver with a more stable metal (like gold or selenium), helping the print last longer and resist the effects of light and environmental conditions.

Better Contrast and Detail

Some toning techniques could increase the print contrast, making the shadow appear richer with more luminous highlights. This would result in finer details and improved visual impact of the image. This process sometimes also helped enhance the clarity of subtle tonal gradations, contributing to a more refined image.

Tradition

Toning was also part of a long photographic tradition. Many used toning to add a distinctive look to their work, affecting the way images were seen in terms of artistry and craftsmanship. Toned prints were sometimes seen as more “finished” or “artistic” compared to untinted ones, and this technique was often used in fine art photography.

Yearning for Period Effects

Toning allowed photographers to mimic the tonal qualities seen in older photographic processes, such as albumen or tintypes, which often had characteristic warm tones. Toning could give a modern print a more vintage or historical appearance, adding to the authenticity and mood of the image. In the age of digital photography, toning images are mainly done to replicate the old processes. These range from the kinds of toning prints to unique processes that yield their looks, like bromoil or platinum prints. The latter gained their colors from how prints were made rather than toning grayscale prints.

Toning Digital Photographs

My interest in toning monochrome images lies mainly in nostalgia. I did a good amount of darkroom work and experimented with toning. The look of a sepia-toned print, with its warm tones has calming, comforting effects on suitable photographs in addition to its links to the past. After experimenting with different toning effects, I also dabbled in creating the looks of platinum and bromoil prints. I do not claim that these results are authentic, but are close to the real processes.

Find The Colors of Toners

The first thing to identify is the color that gives these processes their looks. For instance, “sepia” comes from Latin for “cuttlefish.” The color of the ink extracted from its sac is reddish brown. It was used in writing before influencing photographic toning. Remember that sepia toning gives prints a warm, brownish color and its color intensity varies. On the Internet, you can find specific color information in RGB or hex formats for sepia to use in the digital world.

If you cannot find specific color values, try searching for “sepia-toned prints,” and even refine it by adding a well-known photographer’s name, like “sepia-toned prints by Edward Steichen.” Do this for any toning color you would like to implement, sepia, selenium, gold, platinum, etc.

Identify The Colors in Photoshop

There are different paths to creating color-toned images. I used to do it in Photoshop; and in some ways, it was simpler. For this article, I will focus on toning in Lightroom.

Lightroom used to have a tool panel called “Split Toning.” In recent versions, that panel was replaced with “Color Grading.” It needs input in HSL, hue, saturation, and lightness values. Of these three, we need to focus on hue and saturation. If you were lucky enough to locate the HSL values in your search, use the hue and saturation from the source. If you do not have the color in that format, or no numerical information but a few images, proceed as follows.

If the found image can be saved, save it to a known location. You can even select and save the toned image by using a screen capture tool. Now, open Photoshop. If you have the RGB color numbers, create a new file. When you see the blank image, locate the color selector on the vertical toolbar on the left. It has an icon with two squares, foreground and background. Click on the foreground square. When the dialog window appears enter the RGB values in their respective field. Now read the HSL values and note the hue and saturation values.

If you have a saved image, open it in Photoshop. Crop areas that are not part of the photograph first. Then, follow the Filter/Blur/Average menu option. This will give you a single-color image. To find the HSL value of this color, click the foreground color square again and click the eyedropper anywhere on the image. Jot down the hue and saturation values before closing Photoshop.

Steps In Lightroom

In Lightroom, we want to set the colors for Color Grading and then create a preset that we can use later. First, select an image and convert it to black and white. If you want to use a more flexible B&W conversion than the built-in one, look at the method I developed more than a decade ago, and a variant I added recently. Although I mentioned a method of toning an image after converting it to B&W, that is an ad hoc approach and does not lend itself well to creating presets. What follows is a process that will yield a one-click toning with presets.

Now is the time to expand the Color Grading panel. You will see three color control circles for Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. By clicking on the name above a circle, you can focus on that. When that panel opens you can enter the hue and saturation values into the fields H and S. Enter the H and S values into the Shadows and Highlights panels using the same process.

As you type in the H and S values, you should also see the change in your image. The brightness component will come from the gray tones of the image. Congratulations, you have just converted your monochrome image to an old-fashioned tone. Now you want to save these settings as a preset that can be used with just a click next time. For each toning preset, I create three variations with three saturation levels: low, moderate, and high. Depending on the tonal structure of the image, you may need more or less saturation. Of course, you should create presets for each level with appropriate titles for future use.

Options and Variations

Although highlight and shadow hue and saturation values are generally the same, small deviations may yield better results. For instance, my sepia tone values are 60-10 and 45-30, for highlight and shadow hue and saturation. I have two more, one with weaker and one with stronger tones. They fit my sensibilities and you may have slightly different ones. Not all sepia-toned prints look the same depending on the paper, the toner, and the length of the toning bath.

After you are comfortable with single-color toning, you may consider split toning. For that, you will set different hues for highlights and shadows. One may be warm, one may be cold tone.

Now, enjoy converting your photographs to black-and-white and toning them in the tradition of darkroom photography. Here are some samples from my collection.