Sepia, SEPIA

In grading everyone's Flickr sets of sepia photographs, I was/am ... surprised.
Theoretically, anyway, this should have been the easiest change because it required the fewest number of steps/mouse clicks to get to the end product.
The results, though, are less than stellar. Which in its own way is o.k. - sort of.
This was a "practice" round before the Place assignment, but at any rate, the results still aren't where they should be.
Mainly I say this because I can't even recall the number of times I wrote something similar to "needs more contrast pls" next to the grades when I was discussing your sepia tones prints.

But in hindsight it didn't have much to do with the sepia tone itself, but more with the contrast. I don't feel like the "sliders" in the b/w pop up box were utilized well enough. The prints were largely flat, with not enough detail in the darker values, and with the light values not quite light enough.

It would benefit all, I feel, if you spent some time on Flickr, or some place, looking at a lot of sepia images. While some of these will be not good examples - anyone can load, generally, anything they want online, but some of them will be quite good.
At least in terms of value and contrast.
You are all experienced enough to pretty much know if something is sophisticated enough or not, and you can tell if something should be influencing you positively or not. But only if you let it actually have a positive impact.

And you should constantly be looking at new images anyway. It's good for you. Kinda like vegetables and vitamins.