hwo to make special effects in photoshop

When many people think of black-and-white images, they think of old images that are monochrome, but still have an overall slight color to them. These tones could be due to how the chemicals and paper react to age and the environment, just as much as they could be an added effect.
Adding color to black-and-white images can add interest and feeling to an image. And it can be a great way to emulate the look of old images.

Old-process Effects
There are a few effects that make images look vintage. The darkened corners, called vignettes, are from lenses that were not quite up to par on old cameras. Additionally, older photographs tend to have some color tones to them from the developing process and from age. The tones can range from warm to cool, and can even be a bit blotchy.
One of the first things that I notice in older photographs is the contrast. Many old photographs were taken with very simple cameras by photographers with very little technical expertise, or without techniques that we take for granted now, such as flash. Few photographers had their own black-and-white darkrooms; the photographs were sent to the Kodak factory to be processed. Because of this, either the contrast of these images tends to be full of dynamic contrast because they were done well, probably well exposed with plenty of light, or the images are a bit dull and washed out in order to show plenty of shadow detail.
Additionally, because cameras from before the 1950s used much larger film than 35mm, and much of it very large sheet film, the depth of field in many images can be quite shallow, especially with photographs of people.
Note: Remember that if your camera has a preset old photo or antique photo setting, shooting JPEG+RAW can be a good first step in getting the image to look vintage. It may not give you the perfect old-time look, but if you still have the RAW file, you will have optimal image-processing opportunities.
To create old-time looks digitally, it is important to think about how those images appear now. It is more than being black and white; it is a mix of many things. It is good to make a plan for the look you desire before you take the photograph. Keep in mind that the contrast in old photos won’t always match up with what you think your regular histogram should look like; and in the case of the image below, the pixel bars are pushed out to the very edges of the graph, meaning that there are a lot of lights and darks, and minimal middle grays. The washed-out look of the background suits the flat tone of an image on an overcast day.

Using a number of simple effects, this everyday travel shot gets the look of an old-process image. Darkening the corners, softening parts of the image, and pushing the contrast all help with the effect. Taken at ISO 200, f/5.6, and 1/80 second with a 28mm lens.

A slightly wide lens with a moderate aperture will lead to an image that has a fair amount of depth of field. To make a scene that appears to have less depth of field, as though the aperture is wider or the quality of the lens is not so good, you can add some softness to the image. There are a number of ways to do this, the most effective of which is to follow these steps:

1. Create a new layer of the background in Photoshop.
2. Add the lens blur or the Gaussian blur to that layer.
3. Create a Reveal All layer mask.
4. Select black as the foreground color and then brush away the softness from the subject.
5. In order to get the most realistic effect, brush away the main subject with the brush set to 100 percent opacity.
6. As you move away from the subject, brush away less and less of the blur beginning with a brush stroke at 80 percent opacity around the subject, then a brush stroke at 60 percent opacity, and so on, until the edges still have the entire blurred effect. In the case of the example here, the blur is slightly more irregular as there is substantial softening on the subject’s jacket and still some sharpness around the bridge.

Note that the vignette on the corners of the photograph and its square format also help give it a vintage look.
You can create more specific old-process looks easily in the computer. The tintype, calotype, and ambrotype processes are all part of the building blocks of photography in late 1800s. These wetplate processes were very labor intensive: The image was created while the emulsion of the image was still wet, and then the plate holding the latent image was developed.
In today’s digital world, there are still ways to mimic the actual look of these old-process images. These images are usually warm in tone, yellowish, amber, or even brown. Additionally, they are generally very dark, with a lot of rich blacks. The old process of creating these images used a lot of silver oxide, which allowed for substantial detail in the dark tones of the image.
Tip: When trying to create your own digital tintype or ambrotype, don’t increase the blacks so much that the shadow detail is gone.
It is very possible to create a similar look by adding just a hint of warm tone into an image, along with a strong vignette. You can create the warm tone by adding a bit of yellow, red, and magenta to a scene through any of the color adjustment settings in Photoshop or Lightroom, or with a Photoshop Color Balance adjustment layer, which enables you to make the best adjustments and gives you the ability to change the layer’s opacity. As much as it takes careful adjustment to maintain the detail in those dark areas, remember that most of the old images had very little in the way of pure-white highlights (see below). You also can find similar types of adjustments in programs such as Silver Efex Pro.

The rich tones of shadow detail are beautifully recorded in an image that has ambrotype-looking adjustments. Warm tones, great tonal range, and vignette corners create a timeless image. Taken at ISO 125, f/6.3, and 1/40 second with a 14-45mm lens set to 14mm.

Tip: It is always interesting to look at old images to find inspiration. Look at old books of photographs to study how the images look, and examine the technical aspects of the image, the tonal range, and the color of the toned image, and see how those things might change the actual image, and how those changes might affect images that you are currently making.
Addings Tints and Tones
Toning an image in the wet darkroom did two things: The chemical process helped ensure that images would last longer, and it added a color element to images that at the time had none. In the digital darkroom, tinting and toning the images is purely an aesthetic choice, as it can make them seem older, but it can also impart new feelings based on the tone.
Sepia
Sepia-toned images have a distinct amber to brown tone, and although the amount of tone is at your discretion, it is definitely a warm tone over a black-and-white photograph. Sepia is the simplest way to give an image the feeling of an old photo and consequently add a sense of warmth and nostalgia to a new digital image.
There are a number of ways to create a sepia-toned image in black and white using any of the image editors. After making the appropriate adjustments in the black-and-white conversion tool, follow these steps:

1. Click in the Tint check box. This gives you multiple options on how to adjust the tint.
   
   
   
   

   To create a sepia-tinted image in the black-and-white conversion tool, click in the Tint check box to access unlimited colors and tones to add to your blackand-white photograph.

2. Click the colored box next to the Tint check box. This opens the Select target color window.
3. Use the slider to find the desired color zone.
4. Select the shade that you want the tone to be.
5. Click OK. Alternatively, use the Hue slider to access the correct color using the original image as a guide.
6. Use the Saturation slider to determine how much color tint will be applied to the image.
7. Click OK.

Remember that you can use this toning solution for any sort of color tint to a black-and-white photograph, and you can do it easily for the selenium or cyanotype tones, which are very blue. To get the most flexibility and to be able to revisit these changes, it is best to make these adjustments on a separate layer.
You can adjust the amount of sepia, and really any toning, by using the saturation sliders or the opacity layer. In this image of mother and baby below, I used the sepia tone along with a softening filter to really accentuate the warm fuzzy feeling of this scene. The soft contrast in the image, with virtually no strong black, meant that the sepia tone should be very light in its application. Too much sepia would overwhelm the delicate tones of the image.
Note: No matter what color the tones are that you add to a black-and-white image, from warm to cool to acid green, the process largely remains the same. Use the software solutions that work best for you to add the tones you desire in your images.

The light from a large picture window floods the room with hazy sunlight, making this image full of soft highlights. The gentle sepia tone of the image helps add even more warmth to a loving image. Taken at ISO 500, f/4, and 1/80 second with a 24-70mm lens.

Selenium
Selenium toning creates a much cooler tone than sepia. The process of creating a selenium-toned image is not any different in the digital darkroom than the one for creating a sepia image, but because of the color itself, the subject matter is usually different. Austere subjects, cityscapes, and wintertime scenes tend to work well with selenium toning.
The difference that toning can make to your images is huge (see below). With the effect of a selenium tone on the image, the branches rising out of the blue water have an icy feel of desolation. The blue tone almost lets you feel how cold that water must be in the middle of winter, exactly the feeling that was desired for this image. Think about how different that image would appear with a light sepia tone similar to the tone in the previous image: It might almost look like a warm summer morning. Think critically about the color of the tones that you add to an image and the emotion they will invoke.
The selenium tone in this image was created in Lightroom. In Lightroom, there are a number of creative black-and-white presets, such as sepia and selenium. You can further adjust the preset and save it as a new preset. In the case of the previous image, I created the effect in the toning portion of the Lightroom Develop pane, and then made adjustments for contrast, additional vignetting, and a lightening of the blue tone. The same tools can be used for other toning colors.

A branch rising out of the water gives a cold and lonely feel to the selenium-toned image. The solitary feel of this image was accentuated by the cool, blue tone of the image. Taken at ISO 400, f/8, and 1/640 second, with an 18-200mm lens set to 180mm.

Split Toning
Split toning adds drama to a black-and-white image. When you use multicolor toning, the highlights and shadows in two different colors can create exciting new images. Keeping things simple yet dramatic and using warm tones for the highlights and cool tones for the shadows is a great way to start working with split-toned images.
To split tone an image in Photoshop, follow these steps:

1. Open a black-and-white image.
2. Open up a new Color Balance Adjustments layer. At the top of the Adjustments window, you see radio buttons for Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights.
3. Click the Highlights radio button first and then adjust the color sliders as needed. In this case the image has a warm yellow color for the Highlights tone.
4. Next click the Shadows radio button and then adjust those sliders to add blue tones to the shadows (see the image below).
5. Use the layer to allow for further adjustments later or to change the opacity of the effect on the image.

A Color Balance Adjustments layer can be used to create a split-toned image by separately selecting the tones for Highlights and Shadows. Remember to make small adjustments; large color adjustments here may seem brash and cartoonish.

You can also do this effect very easily in Lightroom: There is a panel for split toning in the Develop pane. Adjusting the sliders to your desired color tones and their saturation for both Highlights and Shadows can achieve the same effect you get with the Color Balance Adjustments layer. Additionally there is a slider you can use to affect the balance between the tones in Highlights and Shadows, and this is really the key to getting the image’s tones adjusted precisely (see below).

Split toning an image creates exciting color mixes on a black-and-white image. The contrast of the scene is shown in the blue tint in the shadow areas and the warm tint on the highlights. Taken at ISO 100, f/5.6, and 1/250 second with a 300mm lens.

Note: Using similar tools to the ones explained for split toning in Photoshop and Lightroom, you can do the process at the RAW level in Adobe Camera Raw and in Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro. You can use Apple’s Aperture to create tinted and toned black-and-white images, but split toning is a bit of a chore with tinted effects brushed on. You can create great looks, but it takes a bit more time and effort.
Coloring Monochrom Images
Selectively adding color to black-and-white images is often called coloring. Adding color to an image is something Photoshop really excels in, more than any other image editing software, although several programs include similar brush tools.
Add color to your monochrome images by following these steps:

1. Clicking the brush tool.
2. Choose the color that you wish to add to the black-and-white image.
3. Simply add it over the top of the image using a new layer. It is a great idea to use a new layer for each color or even for basic areas so that you can adjust each area later independent of the other sections. Try different sizes and hardness of brushes to get the color where you want it and applied in the manner that you want it.
4. Start with a low opacity, like 20 percent, to initially fill in the area. The opacity of the brush is very important when colorizing an image.

Every time that your brush goes over the area, it adds to the amount of color that is going onto the image. So if a brush is set to 20 percent opacity, but there are five brush strokes on the same area, it will be 100 percent color and you will not be able to see the texture of the black-and-white image beneath. Because of this, coloring blackand-white images usually gives images more of a pastel or other soft color look, instead of a brilliant primary color one.
In the illustration below, each of the oranges was brushed in with bright colors, but to see the detail in the black-and-white photograph beneath the color, the opacity was brought down substantially. This places the oranges in a surreal, creamsicle color palette.
The density of the dark tones in the image also makes a difference in coloring a black-and-white image. If there are a lot of dark tones, those areas will still either be largely very dark or take on an unnatural color effect as the color overwhelms the shadow detail. When you are coloring a black-and-white image, use the color mixer in the black-and-white tool to make the tones as bright as possible.
This particular mix was done in Lightroom with its orange-specific slider. As the illustration below shows, the orange in the mixer was adjusted to a very bright area, so there was just some detail and texture of the orange. So if you were planning to paint green over a yard of grass, make sure that the black-and-white mix is adjusted so that the green is light enough to have color brushed over it.

A monochrome color image of all orange is converted to black and white and then painted with surreal color with the brush tool. The pale colors are reminiscent of creamsicle orange. Taken at ISO 100, f/8, and 1/6 second with an 18-200mm lens set to 112mm.

Infrared Effects
Although using a customized infrared sensing camera is immensely cool and fun, it may not be particularly practical for someone who simply wants to get the infrared effect occasionally. When a digital sensor captures infrared light, it is essentially capturing things that are emitting energy. Plants in the spring and the fall, as the energy moves out into the leaves or recedes into the plant as it becomes dormant, show some of that energy best. Things that don’t have a lot of that infrared energy, such as the sky, water, and people’s pupils, become very dark.
Caution: Be cautious when making bold moves with the sliders, even though a good infrared mix might have the green and yellow set to 100 percent brightness. Pulling the blue back to dark can cause banding in the skies, especially as the blue contrasts against the bright tones of a landscape.
Apply this knowledge when you create your own infrared black-and-white mix. Whether you are using Lightroom, Aperture, or Photoshop, adjusting colors with a lot of energy, such as yellow and green, to be brighter, and adjusting blue to be much darker brings you close to emulating the tones of a black-and-white infrared image (see below). Further increasing the contrast and even adding some grain will also help you emulate the look of infrared. Some photographers even add a bit of negative clarity to a simulated infrared image, which gives the middle tones the appearance of a glow.
Just as it is easy to create your own infrared blackand-white-looking images, virtually every black-and-white conversion tool has its own infrared emulation process. These tools are good places to start, but because they try to be all things to all images, they often leave images a bit dull. Knowing how an infrared image is created will help you take those settings beyond the baseline, enabling you to get the image to properly reflect your black-and-white vision.

The bright tones that are captured from the energy of the Joshua tree and the other desert brush create a lot of contrast against the stark black sky. Even though this image was shot originally in color, it is very close to an infrared image. Taken at ISO 100, f/16, and 1/250 second with a 20mm lens.

High Dynamic Range
Expanding the amount of tones in an image beyond what is normal in one exposure is something photographers have done for many years, far before digital. For example, the zone system mastered by Ansel Adams is used to get every f-stop of exposure information onto the initial sheet of film, and then with careful processing, the proper time and chemicals are used to add detail to the highlight and shadow areas. Using multi-contrast papers and certain other developers, that black-and-white negative can then be printed, and the finished print captures far more of the contrast range than a straight image would.
Although it is possible to create HDR imagery with extensive masking and layering of multiple exposures, most photographers now use automated software to get the most out of their HDR images. Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have Photomerge software built in. Additionally, there are countless other HDR photo-processing options, such as Photomatix or Nik’s HDR Efex Pro.
Any sort of expansion or blending of exposures, or even the use of graduated filters, changes the contrast range and is technically called HDR (High Dynamic Range). HDR is also somewhat controversial because the results can often look surreal because all the detail in that range is visible on an image.
High-contrast images, those images whose shadow detail or highlight detail is compromised due to the contrast extreme, are most used for HDR. Getting the most from the original images is important in HDR imagery, so plan to shoot RAW files from the beginning.
Additionally, it is important to bracket your images. Bracketing means creating images that are exposed at different exposures, with the correct exposure as the baseline, plus darker and lighter exposures, each capturing different levels of the contrast in the scene. Doing this well generally necessitates that the images be identical, so having a camera locked on the tripod helps the process immensely.
With many HDR programs, expanding the bracket by two stops on either side of the exposure is usually sufficient, although bracketing five exposures gives you a lot of flexibility; you would expose a frame at –2 f-stops, –1 f-stop, normal, +1 f-stop, and +2 f-stops.
Creating a good bracket of images is the key to good HDR photography; HDR is not a tool to save a bad photograph. When you have frames that capture all the elements of the sunlit areas and the shadow areas of an image in different exposures, opening them in Photoshop Elements’ Photomerge is simple. It may take a few tries because getting the right results doesn’t happen automatically, but once you get the hang of it, the process is not terribly difficult.
In the image below, the foreground shadow area now has plenty of detail and information, while the brightly lit sea stacks in the bay are still richly toned and well exposed.

HDR photography allows for multiple exposure