Darkroom-inspired toning

Safely recreate the effects of photographic printing in software

Photography as we know it actually started with no colour. A lot of experimenting took place to find things that allowed light to record onto a medium. That medium could have been glass, tin or paper. Even when the breakthrough was made and silver nitrate give us true black-and-white, it wasn’t without issue – the resulting prints faded over time.

The solution (quite literally) was to use other chemicals to prevent this fading. This had the side-effect of changing the base tone of the photograph. Looking back now, the tones themselves are something to admire, rather than something to try to correct – so much so that we often recreate these looks ourselves.

Each different process created a different tone. One of the most familiar to us is the rich brown of sepia toning, but there are others. Cyanotypes used a similar process to blueprints, so prints came out in a rich blue. Selenium toning could range from a purple to purple-brown. Of course, selenium is toxic, so it’s fortunate that you can get these looks safely from Lightroom without having to take any precautions!

1 Convert to mono

First, do your black-and-white conversion. Use any method you like. Press V to go straight to the Adobe Monochrome profile. Use any of the B&W profiles in the Basic Panel’s Profile Browser.

Alternatively, you could reduce Saturation to zero, which will remove all colour from the photo.

Here we’ve just pressed V, which is the same as clicking on the Black And White setting in Treatment in the Basic Panel. It’s sufficient for this step, but feel free to tweak yours to taste.

2 Split Toning

Go to the Split Toning panel.

There are three sections: Highlights, Shadows and Balance. These allow you to colour light and dark tones with different colours, as well as change the relationship between those colours.

Begin with Shadows. Moving Hue, which sets the toning colour, does nothing with Saturation set to zero. A quick tip is to hold the Alt/Option key as you drag Hue to see how the hue looks with Saturation temporarily set to 100. For sepia toning, you’re looking for something roughly in the 25-45 range.

3 Refine the look

For this shot, I went with a Hue of 30. The next part is to decide how strong you want the tone to be. In Step 1, you saw that 100 was really rich. You may even like it that strong – but in this case, I think subtle is better. By playing around I found that 27 looked good. You can also choose colours by clicking on the swatch. This will open the colour picker, where you can drag the colours around to get what you like.

4 Highlights

Repeat the process for Highlights. I tend to think of Highlights as being the paper colour for blackand-white toning. You could go for a completely different Hue/Saturation combination. I’ve gone for a more yellow tone, which complements the brown. Hue is 51, with a Saturation of 16. The final part of the step is to move Balance to see what looks best. To the right favours the Shadows, to the left favours the Highlights. In this case I really liked Balance at -37.