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Making a Sunprint from A Digital Photo
Tonal Technique
This technique used to take hours in the old days. The prints were left in developer in the sun for 12 or more hours. The photographer that came up with the idea was famous in his day. Now we can avoid the mess and the time and still come up with gorgeous sunprints.
You can use whatever photo you like or you can use the one I'm using by downloading it from Stockphotoshpere.com.
1)Open the picture you downloaded or another of your choosing. Resize the picture to whatever size you need. I resized width=400 px, height=300 px, resolution: 72.
2 The first step is to take out all the color in this photo. We are mainly making a play off the light and dark tones of this photo so black and white is what we need. Click Adjust > Hue and Saturation > Colorize. Set both Hue and Saturation to 0 and click ok. You now have a black and white.
I know what you are thinking...colorize...hmmmm...why don't we just use that to get our sunprint? You can't get the depth of light and dark tones with the colorize function. I've tested it and colorize doesn't pop the tones as well as the method we are using. You can go ahead and try it for comparison later if you have some time on your hands and have to find things out for yourself.
3) Make a new layer by clicking Layers > New Raster Layer.
4) Click your flood fill tool to make it active. Set Options as follows - Match mode: RGB value; Tolerance: 0; sample merged: unchecked; Blend mode: normal; Opacity: 100. Note: As of the writing of this tutorial, the blend mode on the fill tool is not working properly so we are setting it to normal and setting the blend mode for the layer instead. Flood fill your new layer with color #E2831E. Your layer will be completely orange.
5) Now for the fun part. Go to your layers palette if you don't already have it open and change the blend mode of the orange layer to Burn. Walaa, your picture magically appears! Slide the Layer opacity bar back to 80. You are done!
You now have a realistic sunprint that only took a few minutes to make. Sunprints were typically that orange color and you can experiment with other colors but this one comes closest to the actual developing techinique.
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