Taxi Back In Time

This week's Sunday Challenge had the theme of sepia, which to be honest isn't a style of processing I've used all that often.

So I thought I'd do a little reading up to try and find out exactly what it is other than just "how old photos look".

Apparently, sepia is a pigment that has been used in photography for a very long time and explains why so many old photos from the early part of the 20th Century, especially around the 1940s, have a brown or orange hue to them.

However, since photographs aren’t really printed using those pigments/chemicals anymore, you may be wondering why it’s still a very common look on photos taken today. Well, as with so much in life it comes down to personal preference helped in no small measure by photo editing software.

Sepia can actually produce a warmer image that also gives you the option of giving your images a vintage feel.

This sense of warmth is especially useful in family portraits or family photography by showing a happy, close family in a "warm" setting.

And as photographs aren't printed in brownscale these days, chances are when you see a photograph that has a sepia 'look' you immediately think 'old'.

So sepia it seems has a lot going for it, which I must admit did make me feel guilty for not having done much with it as far as processing goes in the past ... no pun intended!

Having said that, I'd not appreciated that it does have its limitations and not every scene, or even type of photograph, will work in sepia. Once this had dawned on me I decided to spend time experimenting with the technique on photographs I'd already taken rather than going out taking lots of new shots only to come home and find they didn't look good once converted.

The shot I eventually elected to use was taken at the Classics On Show event in Stokesley earlier this year: an album that was never put onto flickr and which has yet to make it onto ipernity.

It differs from many of the show shots I take in that it was a snap of a car I spotted as it entered the show ground, whereas most of them capture the whole car once parked up and usually from a very low vantage point.

This was in effect then just a rushed snap, but I thought that the 1937 Austin 12/4 taxi complete with a collection of old suitcases on the side and the fact that there was little to suggest it had been taken in the 21st Century would lend itself well to the technique being deployed.

The original was slightly underexposed, but I only made minor changes to it before converting it to sepia in PaintShop Pro X2. I'd read that you're supposed to first convert it to a greyscale and then to sepia, but having experimented with both approaches I found the end result to be exactly the same.

Next, I used the albumen filter which I feel helped 'lift' the basic sepia effect and provided an interesting border. Then a little selective 'dodging' and 'burning' to really get the tones the way I wanted them.

Moving on, I turned my attentions to the texture of the image as I wanted to try and make it look old for reasons other than just the sepia effect.

So I dug out some old family photos from days gone by and noticed that nearly all of those that had a sepia look to them were also somewhat 'battle scarred'. They either had creases and tears or the surface was damaged in some way.

Trying to get the creases was a real pain as nothing I did looked quite right, but then I thought of processing the heck out of an old image that had those very same creases on it and then transferring them onto my image.

Then I overlaid the combined layers with a texture called Small Stones in PSP X2. I used a very light beige colour for that layer, set to a low transparency level, and deleted the texture from the central area of the photo so that the cracking effect it provides was more evident around the outer edges of the photo.

Does it all work? I like to think so, but I guess the truth will be borne out by the number of kind comments and/or faves it attracts.