Turn you photos into cool looking effects like vintage and retro snaps! With this fun and simple darkroom you can apply filters, lightning and borders as easy as photos retro easily! Make your photos retro easily and sample pics A website from Admarket; About; Chose an effect wizard
This photo was taken sometime in the 1980′s and you can tell by the look of the image (and not just by the awesome fashion on display!). There’s a strong orangey tone to the photo and the contrast is much lower than we’re used to seeing in contemporary photos. Apps like Instagram which everyone seems to be using at the moment allow you to apply this vintage photo style to modern images.
I think this style appeals to people because there’s a lot more character in the images. Modern, flawless photography can sometimes be quite sterile so I think the imperfections of vintage photography really adds visual appeal to an image. You can also recreate this effect very easily in Photoshop.
Our tutorial image comes courtesy of stock.xchng. As you can see the image has clearly been taken with a contemporary piece of photography equipment because of the bright vibrant colours and great image definition. Time to undo all of that!
1. Load the image in Photoshop. Press cmd-j to create a layer copy and then cmd-u to open the hue/saturation panel. Click the Colorize option and use the following settings: Hue:35, Saturation: 50, Lightness: 35. Click ok.
2. Reduce the opacity of the adjusted layer by 50%. Making sure the adjusted layer is selected in your layers palette press cmd-E to merge the with the layer below.
3. Next step is to adjust the contrast a bit. Although we want a lower contrast level than in modern photos it’s gone a little far so we’ll correct that with the curves function (Image -> Adjustments -> Curves). I’ll let you judge the level here but essentially you want to create a shallow ‘s’ bend by dragging the graph. The image here gives you a guide.
4. Press cmd-U and reduce the saturation of the image by 30.
5. Time to add a subtle burn effect around the edge of the image. Add a new layer style and create an inner glow to frame the edge of the image based on the settings shown.
6. As an additional touch to the retro style we’re going for I created an overexposed area to the right of the image. Adda new layer and with the gradient tool chose the default purple-orange gradient. Drag the gradient tool from left to right and change the blending mode of the layer to Screen. The effect is too intense, however, and needs to be made more subtle.
7. Add a layer mask to the gradient layer. Use a large black soft round brush and set the opacity and flow to around 40%. Use your judgement here and carefully remove the gradient layer as you see fit. I left the orange area fairly intact in order to create the exposure effect.
8. The photo has really got that retro feel to it now but to take the effect even further I’ve added some textures over the top of the image. Really old photos tend to take a battering over time as people handle them to look at. This can lead to small speckles and areas of the photo being totally removed. Open the speckle image in the tutorial pack and drag it on to a new layer. Change the new layer’s blending mode to Screen so that the black becomes transparent. You may want to reduce the number of speckles so either use the eraser tool or create a layer mask.
9. To finish off I used a folded paper stock photo to create some subtle creases over the top of the image. I desaturated the paper photo and change the blending mode to Soft Light. I also added a layer mask and removed the areas around the edge of the creases so I did not obscure the work done on the image beneath.
This is the final result. I hope you found this tutorial useful and you can use the techniques here in your graphic and web design projects in the future.