Origins

• Produced using a pigment from the ink of the Sepia cuttlefish (a relative of the squid), sepia originally was a watercolor pigment. Any painting or drawing, such as Leonardo de Vinci's drawings, created with the reddish-brown sepia pigment is sepia tone.
  
  

History

• The sepia tone process for photography developed in the 1700s as a preservation treatment. Stored in identical conditions, photos fixed with sepia-tone (silver sulfide) survived up to 50 percent longer than standard black and white prints fixed only with silver. As modern processes for fixing photographic emulsions became available early in the 20th century, use of sepia tone declined. By the 1930s, Kodachrome color processing took over the market.
  
  

Process

• In photography, sepia tone is achieved through a chemical process of adding the sepia pigment to a photographic positive print after is passes through various negative processes. The chemical process converts metallic silver residue to silver sulfide, a chemical that resists degradation and consequently preserves the photographic print. For this reason, most surviving early photography is sepia toned.
  
  

Modern Use

• Romantic gothic photography, wedding photography and historically themed portraiture use digital means to produce a sepia-toned appearance. Many digital cameras and camcorders have a sepia tone mode. Simulated sepia, digitally applied to any photo either at the moment of capture or during processing, utilizes various photo-enhancing software techniques.
  
  

Digital Sepia Tone

• Photo-manipulation software programs offer sepia tone presets or processes for digitally enhancing images with a sepia tint. Sophisticated software programs utilize the halftone or duotone process with yellows and browns to create the sepia-toned look with depth, while simpler programs offer a monochrome version. In processed color applications, no single color produces sepia since it is a range of yellow and magenta mixtures for CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellow-black) print processing applications and red and green shades for RGB (red-green-blue) video or Web applications.
  
  

Historic Applications

• Many famous images are sepia-toned, from Edward Weston's photographs of Carmel to the Kansas scenes in "The Wizard of Oz." French cinematographer, Henri Alekan used a sepia-based process he called light and shadows in his 1987 classic "Der Himmel über Berlin" ("Wings of Desire") to show the angels' point of view in sepia-tinted monochrome and the human point of view in full color.