Here’s what the photo looked like before we used the special effects in Photoshop.

Caturday with sepia and spherized art effects.

Today, we used the sepia art tool in Photoshop to give this cat, Buster Stewart, a whole new look. That’s not so easy to do with a long-haired black and white Tuxedo cat because his coloring is a bit overpowering.

For those of you who may not be familiar with sepia, it involved adding a reddish-brown color to monochrome black and white photographs. It was particularly popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a way of adding a cool effect to what might have otherwise been an ordinary photo. When we see the effect, it usually makes us think of an old historic photo.

Photoshop has made this formerly arduous process easy. All you do is select one of the ‘Adjustment’ options under the’ Image’ menu. Then select ‘PhotoFilter’, and then choose ‘Sepia Options’.

While it may be difficult to see with the cropping, we also used a spherized effect. If you look closely, you will see an elliptical sphere surrounding the cat. We found this under the ‘Filter’ menu. We selected ‘Distort’ and chose ‘Spherize’.

Then, we selected the horizontal type mask tool and did an overlay on the type.

We had wanted to try the watercolor or palette knife effect, but we didn’t think it made that much difference between before and after.

Years ago, Paws’ Mom dabbled in oil painting and charcoal and pencil drawings. A few years ago, we had a chance to take a few classes. Photoshop makes all this easy. We don’t have to set up an easel. We don’t have to mix our paints manually. And we don’t have to wait for the paint to dry. If we don’t like the effect, we do ‘Control Z’ and it’s gone.

That’s a far cry from what we had to do in a darkroom, where making a sepia effect, whether red or blue was a huge ordeal. It was also a chore to do any spherized effects. And painting effects in the darkroom were pretty much unheard of. With more sophisticated apps and software, we can do just about anything.

Do you like to dabble in artistic effects? Do you use Photoshop or some other photo editing software? What’s your favorite effect? Do you have some favorite tips you’d like to share? Perhaps we can share and do a Caturday art roundup? What do you think?