Benefits
of the plugin

Convert a digital color photo to a B/W grayscale.
Apply colored filters to the conversion - like lens filters for B/W photography.
Adjust contrast.
Tone the B/W image any way you like.
Use a preset tone to emulate traditional photographic print techniques...
Sepia, cyanotype, platinum, silver gelatin, kallitype, van dyck, palladium, silver.

The Toned Photos filter plugin works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, CMYK.

Toned Photos
filter controls

This is the Toned Photo plug-ins control panel at one third size. Click on the photo or the links to see the plug-in at full size. The filter has these sets of controls:

1. Photo color-filters
2. Contrast
3. Tone Grayscale
4. retouch levels

Examples

The Toned Photos plugin is one of the kind for emulating traditional techniques. Here we show Original, Kallitype, Silver Gelatin, Cyanotype.

The plug-ins tone grayscale controls

Tone grayscale

This is where the toning of the photo is controlled.

You can either make your own tones and save them for later use, or use a preset tone.

The preset tones will influence the four sliders, but will not influence the colorpicker. This means you can use a preset tone, or set your own slider values, and then add the colorpicker to it. Vice versa you can pick a color in the colorpicker and fine tune it with the sliders. Click on the rectangle to open the standard colorpicker.

Pigmentation weight

This is the most important slider when emulating traditional techniques since it determines how the tone is distributed between light, mid tones and dark areas. Some techniques show more tone in the lights, others more in the darks. If this does not give you enugh control, you can additionally use the three sliders for lights, mid tones and darks.

Presets

Presets

We have carefully made preset tones from a number of scans of photographic prints done with the various techniques. These print-scans were kindly provided by photographers mastering the craft from around the world. All the classic techniques are represented (except gum bichromate)...

Sepia, cyanotype, light cyanotype, platinum, silver gelatin, kallitype, van dyck, palladium, silver.

The nine preset tones

Colorpicker

Colorpicker

Using the colorpicker you can create any tone your heart desires. Romantic, mysterious, cool...

Retouch levels

The lights, mid tones, darks sliders are common to most Power Retouche plug-ins. In this plugin we have extended the controls with a separato control for whites and for blacks. They let you determine how much the filtering should be applied to the various levels.

Using the lights, mid tones, darks sliders can create very interesting effects...

The colored lens filters

The filter has an internal color to grayscale conversion that is identical to the perceptual luminance method in the B&W Studio plugin. Its a neutral conversion. As any photographer knows, you want to add colored filters to the conversion in order to make some colors brighter and others darker. Above we used orange.

Color filters

The seven basic pure filter colors are provided as presets. They are:

G = Green
Y = Yellow
O = Orange
R =Red
M = Magenta
B = Blue
C = Cyan

The slider along the spectral bar lets you adjust the color to any of about 1200 settings, so virtually any color is possible. The selected color will be displayed in the rectangle to the right when add filter is on.

Strength

The strength slider lets you adjust the intensity of the filter.

Add filter

The Add filter checkbox turns the colored filter on or off. When on the rectangle to the right will display the filters color.

Tips on using colored filters

Yellow, orange and red for contrast enhancement. Yellow generally enhances contrast by darkening shadows a bit. Orange and red do this even more. Red is the strongest contrast-enhancer. Red produced dramatic pictures of sunlit clouds against blue sky, since it will darken a pure blue sky to almost black. Flesh tones become paler with these three filters.

Magenta is a general contrast reducer. Otherwise it is comparable to orange, only it is milder with the shadows since shadows often have a magenta-violet tone that gets brightened whilst the warm toned lights get subdued. Lips get very pale with this. Light greens on plants turns dark.

Cyan will darken the skin and lips and enhance drawing of flesh tones. It will render the blue sky very pale. To soften extremely hard light cyan can be useful since it brightens cool shadows and deepens warm lights.

Green is also good for models where it serves as a mild flesh tone deepener and contrast-enhancer. For models you would normally want either yellow or green. Unless the light is too hard, then you might want magenta.

Blue is a very powerfull contrast reducer when used pure (as the B button will do) on outdoors photography. It darkens flesh tones a lot. Generally you will want to move the trackbar a bit away from pure blue. Use it to bring out details in shadows (by brightening them) and lights (by subduing them) when needed. Mostly cyan is a better choice than blue.

Controlling the color channels

You can use the plugin to control which of the RGB color channels will be used when converting to grayscale. The buttons will select the pure colors, so if you do not move the slider after pressing the buttons, you have selected one or two of the color channels. Red, green and blue use only the respective R, G or B channels. Orange uses two channels: red and green. Magenta uses red and blue. Cyan: blue and green. Yellow: red and green. You can determine how much of each channel to use by moving the slider. Lowering the strength slider will mix in more or less of the excluded color channel(s).

The plug-ins contrast controls

You might want to edit contrast independently of the contrast control gained with the colored filters.

Contrast %

The contrast slider lets you raise or lower contrast.

Balance

Balance let's you change the photos balance between light and dark areas - in effect changing the average brightness of the photo.

Graduated effect

Color values

This lets you pick a spot in the preview and get the data of the colors of the changed image in RGB and CMYK. L is the lightness in percent.

Advanced uses

Combined with Color range