Trying to add a sepia effect - advice needed

[soldave]

Took a few pics of the WWII wreck, the USS Emmons on Saturday. I'm trying to add a sepia effect to age it a little, and am not sure about the results. I've got a copy of the original pic, the a sepia & grain effect added manually, and this sepia effect plus a circular vignette. Do the sepia ones look good, and if not, what am I doing wrong? I like the 3rd one, but feels it just needs to be a little more brown than it is to look truly aged.

www.soldave.34sp.com/emmons.jpg - original pic

www.soldave.34sp.com/emmons2.jpg - sepia & grain

www.soldave.34sp.com/emmons3.jpg - sepia, grain & vignette

I think this pic has the potential to be really good, and would appreciate any advice from you experts out there

 

[PapaBob]

Dave:

The first step in producing a good sepia is to render the image the way you want to see it in B&W. Then you can add any "sepia" color you want. This is my start on the base image.

 

[soldave]

That's a nice start - cleared things up straight away. I was following a tutorial to get the sepia effect and wasn't doing it manually. I'd tried playing with the hue and saturation adjustment layer, but I'm no expert at Photoshop at all and wasn't successful.

 

[PapaBob]

Here I added the color. It might not be what you are looking for but I wanted to give you the general idea. If you need my photoshop PSD then send me a PM with your email address. Also let me know what version of Photoshop you are using. The H/S is a nice quick conversion but it does not give you the contol you can get with other functions. On the above I used the channel mixer to get the B&W conversion I thought was appealing. I then used the shadows/highlights to bring out some more detail followed by a sharpen. I then added the color by using a color fill layer set to "color mode" and lowered the opacity to my taste.

---Bob

 

[DaytonaDave]

Here's my go at it... two versions....

Darn... how do you upload files?

 

[alcina]

Daytona - You will need to host them remotely (photobucket etc) and then use the image or http tags. In photobucket you simply copy the IMG information - it's in the third box under the thumbnail of your image.

 

[DaytonaDave]

http://home.earthlink.net/~pringlephoto/emmons/emmons2.jpg
http://home.earthlink.net/~pringlephoto/emmons/emmons3.jpg

I uploaded them to a server... here they are.

 

[DaytonaDave]

Ok.. wow, I figured it out....

 

[DaytonaDave]

OK, now that I see these up on the net, I really, really wish I had cropped the dark object out of the top of the frame.

 

[midwestdvr]

my take on your photo....