This tutorial will show you how to transform a standard color photo into a mix of colors, black and white and sepia in a fast and easy process.
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Start with your original and add an adjustment layer of channel mixer.
Layer —> New adjustment layer —> Channel mixer.
Choose ‘monochrome’ and play with the sliders until you are happy with the black and white version.This gives you more options than a plain desaturation with CRTL+SHIFT+U .For portraits I personally like the blue channel most quite often.I let the total set to 100.
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Change the ‘opacity’ of this layer to 50 %.You can re-adjust to personal taste later.
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Now come the sepia tones.
go to Layer —> New adjustment layer —> Hue/Saturation.
check ‘Colorize’ and add your wished sepia values.I tend to use 30 Hue and 20 Saturation as values.
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Adjust the opacity of this layer to 50 percent as well or adjust to personal state later when you have the final overview.
Now duplicate this sepia layer ( CTRL + J or Layer —> Duplicate Layer ) and set the blending mode to Soft Light to add more tone and get more contrast.Set the layer’s opacity and fill both to 50 % or adjust to personal taste.
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For the final contrast, add a ‘curves’ layer, it will give more control than a ‘contrast’ layer.
go to Layer –> New adjustment layer —> curves
I add a little s-curve with three points.
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Which gives a final result of :
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compared to the original :
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[ --> Download the small .psd with layers version here <-- ]
Other example :

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