Many people enjoy black and white or sepia-toned images. This tutorial shows a quick way to non-destructively add those effects to your images. You can achieve endless color possibilities using a Gradient Map.

First, get your original photo fixed up the way you want (edit out blemishes, adjust your levels, etc).

Then do Layer...New Adjustment Layer...Gradient Map. Give it a name (or take the default), and click OK.

You will then be shown a screen similar to this.

Click the drop-down arrow on the right end of the gradient to bring up Photoshop's standard gradient choices. If you choose the Black to White one, this will immediately give you a black and white image. Not bad. But the real fun comes in when you adjust the gradient to fill between any two or more colors you want.

To do a sepia tone, choose the black to white gradient as a starting point. Double-click anywhere within the color bar (as indicated by the red arrow in the graphic above), and you will see this screen.

Set your left color by double-clicking the leftmost box (indicated by the left red arrow). Set it to be a dark brown (I used #261B04) and set your right color to be a light tan (I used #EFDAB7). Voila, a nice sepia gradient, replacing the various levels of color in your original with colors from the gradient.


The possibilities are endless. For this blue toned image, I used
#040926 for the left and # B7C9EF for the right color.


You can also click on the color bar to add more points in the gradient.
For this wild-colored variation, I added a third point in the middle,
and took it from brown to blue to yellow. (453902 to 6D7AAC to EFE595).



Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.