Q. I’m wondering if there’s some snazzy way to get sepia image conversion with PIL?

Simple sepia toning is usually done by converting the image to grayscale, and then attaching a brownish palette to the image. See e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_palettes#Color_gradient_palettes

To do this in PIL, convert the image to mode “L”, and use putpalette to attach a suitable palette to the image. Something like this might work: