A plug-in for the camera RAW image processing program Bibble.
Author: Sean Puckett (seanmpuckett@gmail.com).

What does Tony do?

Tony allows you to apply colour tints and tones to your images. Tony works by simulating ink and paper. You first choose a paper colour, and the colour and type of ink. Your source image controls how the ink is applied -- darker image areas get more ink. This simple approach is easy to understand and control, and still allows a wide range of subtle and dramatic effects.

Download Freeware Now

Tony 1.0 freeware is available for download now.
Windows, Linux and Mac versions included in the same download. Read the Tony Release Notes, then access the download area.
You'll find installation instructions as INSTALL.txt in the zipfile.
Please provide feedback at the email address above.

Purchase TonyPRO Professional Version Now

Windows, Linux and Mac versions included in the same download. TonyPRO 1.0 is now available for Windows, Macintosh (Intel and PPC), and Linux. TonyPRO includes the Random and Bleedthru sliders that allow extra control over the creation of custom tones. TonyPRO also includes all of the sample tones shown below as presets.

TonyPRO: $10 USD

Already purchased, but need an upgrade? Click Here.

Sample Output

First released sample image. Deep purple ink on pale white. Green ink on cream-coloured paper. Black carbon laserprint on goldenrod paper. A silly example that shows what Tony's simulation engine is capable of. Crazy TonyPRO colouring. Magenta paper, bright red ink, heavy randomness, and 0.81 bleedthru. Sadly, the image has lost most of its joy here due to overcompression. In the real one, the flower petals look like velvet floating over the bizarre blades of grass. Opposite end of crazy -- very subtle toning using the random function to add life. Note how the image tone in the pale colours is more yellowish than the darker ones, which are more bluish red. A nice platinum tone. B&W conversion by AndyPRO.

All images Copyright 2006 Sean Puckett

User Interface

The screenshot is from TonyPRO; Tony Freeware doesn't include the Random or Bleedthru sliders.

Enabled Checkbox

Controls whether Tony affects the image.

Reset Button

Resets all controls within Tony to a very moderate sepia-like tone.

? Button

Displays version number and author contact information.

Paper Group

These settings control the colour of the simulated paper media.

Colour

Controls the colour (hue) of the paper. Values range from -180 to 180, reaching all the way around a 360 degree colour wheel. Each tickmark over the slider is a primary or secondary colour -- this makes finding a specific colour easy. From left to right, the tickmarks are: Cyan, Blue, Magenta, Red (centre), Yellow, Green, Cyan.

Saturation

Controls how intense the paper colour is. A saturation of 0 will always be white, no matter what colour is chosen. A saturation of 1 will be the most intense version of the colour chosen available. Settings in between allow fine adjustment of the paper colour. Settings nearest 0 are very subtle off-white colours that work well for most traditional toning situations.

Ink Colour Group

These settings control the colour of the simulated ink. Colour and saturation operate just like the paper silders. Ink, however, is always dark, whereas paper is light. A saturation of 0 is always black ink. Saturations near 1 produce very intense colours in the midtones, but in general the ink is always close to black when heavily applied.

Colour

Controls the colour (hue) of the ink.

Saturation

Controls how intense the ink colour is.

Random (TonyPRO only)

What is reality? Tony is a simulation, and most simulations (e.g. selecting the "Sepia" option in your camera menu) look flat and dead, because they're too perfect. TonyPRO has a solution to the too-perfect simulation: the Random slider. There are 100 different random alterations available that can be applied that lend variety in in colour, tone and saturation. The Random slider makes computer toning look like a real world print because it's not perfect: it's got variations in colour ranging from subtle (near 0.0) to dramatic (near 1.0) that make Tony PRO toned prints look far more realistic than too-perfect gradients from Photoshop or your camera.

The good news: The random slider is reproducible (each of the 100 settings is always the same, although the effect it creates is a random change of the tone gradient), so you can count on your Tony settings always doing the same thing. The bad news: There's no way to predict what each slider setting does. You'll just have to go through them, one mouse wheel tick at a time, until you find one you like. I find this kind of fun, actually.

About the images: The Cyanotype10 preset has a Random setting of 0.75. The "No Random" image shows you what you get if you reduce Random to 0. See the difference?

Transparent

This slider adjusts the transparency of the ink media. A setting of 0 creates fully opaque ink (e.g. pigment). A setting of 1 creates fully transparent ink (e.g. dye). Settings in between allow various combinations of pigment/dye.

Why is ink transparency important? Tony simulates real media. If you apply a transparent blue ink to a yellow piece of paper, you'll get green. If the same ink was an opaque pigment (like tempera paint), you'd just get the blue. Sometimes you want some of the paper colour to show through the ink. Sometimes you don't. Tony allows you to choose. In general, settings near 0.2 to 0.3 produce the most realistic pigmented output, because rarely do inks completely obscure the paper they're applied to.

The Transparent control is probably the hardest one to understand. Until you're pretty confident with the rest of Tony, it's probably best to leave it set to 0, where ink and paper colour don't affect each other and you get a simple graduation of colours from paper to ink when Tony is active.

Control Group

These settings control how the type of ink, and how it is applied to the paper.

Bleedthru (TonyPRO only)

Controls how much of the original image colour is mixed with the chosen ink colour. It is not quite the same thing as mixing the original image itself -- it actually alters the ink colour as applied by the ink simulator. Bleedthrough is a great effect when used subtly. It adds "life" to tone that makes an image more interesting, because the tone is actually relevant to the image content.

As an example of what this slider can do, imagine you've got a picture of a forest road with a red stop sign, and you choose to load the Resinotype2 preset, which is a green-on-cream tone. You like the result, but the stop sign has disappeared into the foliage because everything is now green. Bleedthrough would allow you to let some of the original image colour through. In this case, if you chose, say, 0.4 bleedthrough, the stopsign would become more brown than the rest of the image as the original red is mixed with the green ink. This would make the sign stand out while not spoiling the overall tone of the image.

Note: Bleedthrough does not work when Andy is enabled yet.. This is because Andy removes the colour information from the image before Tony gets to it. A future update of AndyPRO and TonyPRO will include communication between the two plug-ins to allow colour information to be routed to Tony so the Bleedthrough function will work even when Andy is active.

Density

Density controls how thickly the ink is applied according to your original image. Higher values produce a lighter (less ink) image, lower values produce a darker (more ink) image.

Presets Included with TonyPRO

I have just over 50 different presets for use with TonyPRO that are more-or-less accurate simulations of various antique and modern alternative print processes as well as various toning techniques on traditional print media. These are by no means the limit of what Tony can achieve, but they do provide a familiar starting point for toning an image.

Note: Don't use the presets as a crutch! They're there to serve as a place to start, and as a resource for demonstrating what Tony can do. If you just keep flipping through presets to find the "perfect" one, you're missing out on the joy of creating your own tone that suits your image. That's why Tony has all these sliders, not so you can just find a preset that's "good enough" but so that you can use it to create something unique and wonderful.

Toning

Print and toning techniques based on more-or-less traditional chemistry. Click the name for reference information via Wikipedia or alternativephotography.com -- it's fascinating reading.

• Palladium - 3
• Platinum - 9
• Selenium - 1
• Sepia - 3
• Silver Gelatine - 5
• Van dyke - 4

Samples of Tone Presets

The small images on this page are quite highly compressed and this tends to obscure fine gradations of tone. Clicking on the image will open another page with a much clearer version. If you're using a tabbed browser, open several in additional tabs and click back and forth to do A/B comparisons that reveal tone quite clearly.

Alternative Processes

These are unusual or antique print processes (click name for more info). Keep in mind that Tony only reproduces tones, not texture, so the daguerrotype simulation won't be "shiny" and the carbon print simulation won't have paper texturing. Be sure to read about these processes -- they're a fascinating resource of information about where photography started (and where daring chemist/photographers continue to take it). And if you take it in your mind to try some of these techniques in the real world, http://www.alternativephotography.com is a great place to start learning more.

• Ambrotype - 1 preset
• Bromoil - 3
• Carbon - 3
• Chrysotype - 2
• Cyanotype - 4
• Copper Photogravure - 2
• Daguerrotype - 2
• Ferrotype - 1
• Kallitype - 2
• Resinotype - 1
• Salt - 2
• Satista - 1
• Ziatype - 2

Samples of Above Presets

The small images on this page are quite highly compressed and this tends to obscure fine gradations of tone. Clicking on the image will open another page with a much clearer version. If you're using a tabbed browser, open several in additional tabs and click back and forth to do A/B comparisons that reveal tone quite clearly.

Print Based

These presets recreate the tone of actual prints that I like a lot. They're named after the print.

• Apples
• Coastal Trumpets

Samples of Print-Based Presets

Preset Installation

The presets are included within the .zip file in a "Presets" folder. Place the contents of this folder (all the .Tony files) in your Bibble user data directory in the "options" subfolder.

Don't know where your user data is? In Bibble, select File -> Preferences -> Cache

For example, if your bibble user data is kept at

G:\bibble-cache\

Then you'll place the .Tony preset files in

G:\bibble-cache\options\

How do I use presets?

Once you've installed them, click the green down arrow icon at the upper right of the Tony panel, then select "Load..." The list of presets should appear.

Notes

What about the complex colour mixing tools you mentioned earlier?

Those are on the way in a product called TonyULTRA. I want to keep Tony and TonyPRO fairly easy to understand and use. The settings that allow this level of control are quite complex and I don't want people who aren't interested in looking at a plug-in with fifteen sliders on it to have to deal with them. TonyULTRA will be a seperate plug-in that does not replace Tony or TonyPRO, so once TonyULTRA is released, you'll have a choice of easy-n-quick, or complex-n-powerful, depending on your particular needs. I hope that makes sense, and seems fair.

Legal

Tony is copyright 2006 Sean M Puckett, all rights reserved. Tony may not be distributed except via direct download from its homepage here.