Sepia

What is sepia?

Sepia is a dark, warm red-brown, named after the ink of the cuttlefish, whose genus is Sepia. In photography it also means a brown-toned black and white print, and by extension any picture recolored in browns and creams to look old.

The ink is a defense. A cuttlefish squirts it to cloud the water and slip away, and its dark color comes from melanin, the same family of pigment that colors human hair and skin.

How did cuttlefish ink end up in art?

Artists drew with cuttlefish ink for centuries, but sepia as a refined watercolor pigment dates to the late eighteenth century. Jakob Seydelmann, a professor at the Dresden Academy, is usually credited with a way of concentrating it for painting, in the 1770s or around 1780 depending on the source.

Dresden became a center of the sepia wash drawing. Caspar David Friedrich made his early landscapes in sepia there, built up in delicate brown washes before he painted in oil. A 2017 study of Friedrich's early sepias reports that Seydelmann's own sheets turned out to contain surprisingly little actual sepia. Most tubes sold as Sepia today are blends of modern pigments mixed to the same brown.

Why are old photos brown?

Some were toned on purpose. From the 1880s, many studios put black and white prints through a sepia toner, which converts the image silver to silver sulfide. The result was warmer, and it also lasted longer, since silver sulfide resists the air pollution that slowly eats a plain silver image.

Plenty of brown old photos were never toned, though. Albumen prints, made on paper coated with egg white, were the most common kind for much of the nineteenth century, and the albumen layer yellows as it ages. An untoned silver print that was poorly washed or stored can also fade toward yellow-brown. So when you see a faded brown photo with weak, yellowish highlights, age is the likelier cause; a print with rich, chocolate shadows and clean cream highlights was probably toned.

What hex code is sepia?

There isn't an official one. CSS has a sepia() filter but no color named sepia, and the hex code most color lists give, #704214, is a convention. Real sepia prints range from a cool gray-brown to a warm reddish chocolate, depending on the toner and the paper.

How to make a sepia photo

Sepia Filter maps each pixel's brightness onto a ramp from a dark brown Shadow to a cream Highlight. The default pair, #2b1a0e and #f1d9a9, sits in the warm middle of the range. For the reddish chocolate of a heavily toned cabinet portrait, darken and redden the Shadow toward #3a1608. For an age-faded albumen look, lighten the Shadow to a mid-brown like #5a4026 and push the Highlight toward a straw yellow such as #ead9a0, which squeezes the contrast the way a faded print does.

To imitate a sepia wash drawing, start from a picture with strong shapes, and use Duotone Generator with a deep brown Shadow and a near-white paper Highlight like #faf6ec. The clean white keeps it looking like ink on paper and not like a photograph.

Further reading

• Caspar David Friedrichs frühe Sepien als Vorstufe zur Landschaftsmalerei (Werner Busch, Heidelberg University)