Can anyone tell me how to achieve this effect in Photoshop please.

There are some fine examples at:

http://jackpaolini.com/galleries/panoramic/ and http://www.newsfromnowhere.com/revphoto/revenantphotographyA.html

they are sepia toned

It is not as straightforward as it seems if you want to get very close to that tonal characteristics of old 5"x4" or 10"x8" large format film look. You can use duotones for coloring; that's easy. I want to know how to simulate the dark shadows and high contrast old film look.....selective curve manupulation with adding contrast to highlights and flattening the shadows??? In some silver gelatin prints, the shadow has very dense black....in other cases there is compression of mid-tone.

Not sure if it will be of any help but have you looked at ( free) virtual photographer plug in ?

Palms

http://www.optikvervelabs.com/

Is it this effect you want to achieve? Picture is not the best, took it with a 1MPixel cam.

Thanks to all for responses.

I tried sepia transforms but couldn't get the effect. There are tonal differences & some the local contrasts are very stark. Initially I thought there were not as many levels as in a modern photo so I messed around with histogram shapes & also tried resampling to a lower spectral resolution.

PatrickB - yes, that seems to be getting close. How did you do it please?

Palms1 - Looks like a great plugin. I'll give it a go.

I am actually playing around with images of icebergs, pack ice, etc taken on a trip to Antarctica. Some of the colour images are framed & hung on the wall already & look great. However, I went to an exhibition of Frank Hurley's images & thought I try some B&Ws in his style. I know Hurley was a dark room wizard & so I thought that it might be possible manufacture some his effects.

Hi Oz,

that's an easy one, I got it from Katrins latest book:

At first I converted it to b&w with a channel-mixer layer, monochrome checked and used the red channel 100% and some of the others. Then a selective color layer, tweaked the colors a bit to bring some detail into the picture

Katrins trick:

A color-balance layer. The shadows have more blue and less red, the highlights vice versa. The settings were something like:

Shadows -20/0/+20
Highlights +20/0/-20

Tell me if I didn't explain that properly please :)