Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Photoshop Elements Technique: Vintage Photo

Have you ever wanted to make a recent photo look like it was from the era of your grandmother? Well now you can! Just follow these quick and easy steps using Photoshop Elements( I use version 8 but it will work with older versions just a few things may be a little different.)

Steps:

Open your photo in Photoshop, raw or jpeg. First you will want to duplicate the background layer, you can do this by right clicking on the background layer and selecting duplicate layer or you can find it under Layer, duplicate layer.

Then you will want to change the photo to Sepia color but make sure before you do this you have the background layer copy selected in the layers box. You can do this by clicking on the adjustments layer icon (this looks like a circle that is half black and half white and is located at the bottom of the layer box) and selecting adjust hue/saturation. Then click the colorize box and adjust the hue and saturation until you reach the desired color of sepia tone. For my photo I went with Hue 29 and Saturation 21.

Then with the background copy selected again go under Filter, Noise, Add Noise. A dialogue box will pop up and allow you to choose a percentage. I went with 25%.

Then select the burn tool which is sometimes hidden under the sponge tool (you can change which tool is selected by clicking on it and holding down to see what the other options are.) After selecting burn adjust the settings to Pixels about 330, Range midtones and 25% exposure. Then to be able to use the burn tool you must flatten your image. You can find this under Layer, Flatten image, then reduplicate the background layer. Go around the edges of the photo until all edges are darkened to your liking going heavy in the very corners. This technique is hard to do so sometimes you may want to just start over and try again. The best way to do this is to just delete the background copy and reduplicate the layer.

Now you have a fun Vintage looking photo. This technique would be fun to try on a photo of you or your children and say it was their grandma or something, lol!

2 comments:

Nathalie said...

This is cool Carrie! I 'll have to try it sometimes! Thank you for the instructions!

Conchin said...

Thank you for the instructions!