As we further progress into the Instagram era, where old is new,
many users are looking to send their pictures back in time
and give them a retro look. Let's take a look at how you can
transform your images into ancient artwork.
Starting off very simple, we need to convert our image to a
black and white photo.
Because I love working non-destructively, let's go ahead and add a black and
white adjustment layer
by clicking on the adjustment layer icon in your Layers panel,
and then selecting ‘black and white’. Using adjustment layers allows you to edit the
adjustment at a later point if needed.
Now that the photo is stripped of its color, we need to wash it out a bit.
Older cameras were not able to capture all the tone that today's cameras are
capable of,
so we need to drop the contrast for photo.
Again, using an adjustment layer, brightness and contrast will do the trick.
However, if you're using a fairly new version of Photoshop
simply decreasing the contrast will not work that well, as the adjustment has been
changed in recent years.
You want to make sure to activate the ‘legacy’ option,
and then decrease the contrast until you have nice a subtle washed over look to your
photo.
Good. The next element we're going to add will act as faded spots you might see
in some older photos.
Start by creating a new layer using the icon in your Layers panel,
or with a Command or Control Shift and ‘N’ shortcut.
With your color set to Black and White (which can be achieved by pressing
the ‘D’ key on your keyboard),
head up to the Filter menu, down to ‘render’, and then ‘clouds’.
The clouds that you will be presented with will most likely contain too much white,
so we want to remove a good portion of that using your Command or Control
’L’ shortcut to access your levels adjustment. Pull the Midtown slider to
the right
in order to pull in additional dark tones, which will help with our blending.
Once that's done, in your Layers panel, change the blend mode of this layer to
’Color Dodge’
and then decrease the opacity to around 20 percent. That should leave you with
very subtle white spots on your image.
Now we come to the cracks. Every old photo needs a few creases and cracks.
While these could be created completely in Photoshop using a texture may give
you better results.
So over at CGtextures.com, I found this nice texture that contains white
cracks.
Making sure your cracks are white is very important - you'll see why in a
moment.
With the texture open in Photoshop I can drag right over to the document I'm
working on and move it in place.
When you have it where you want it double click on its
layer in the Layers panel to bring up the blending options.
Take a look at the ‘blend if’ section at the bottom. This will allow us to
blend away the darker areas and the texture,
leaving only the white cracks. ‘Blend if’ contains two bars:
one for the current layer that you have active, and one for the layer below it.
Because we're looking to blend the areas of the active layer
we're only going to focus on the top bar. Now, as we want to remove the darker
tones,
dragging the shadow slider to the right will start to exclude them from our
texture.
But as you drag along, the results are looking very harsh.
Here's a neat tip: holding down your ALT key in Windows,
Option key on the Mac, you can split the slider to create a much smoother blend,
which should leave you with only the cracks visible and maybe a touch of gray,
which is fine.
Once you're happy with the blend, change the blend mode of the layer to
’vivid light’ and then decreased opacity until you're happy with the result.
The crack should be nice and subtle, nothing over-dramatic.
We're almost finished. At this point, we're going to go back and edit our
original image.
First, by adding a little bit of noise. With your photo selected in your Layers
panel,
make sure you convert your layer for Smart Filters under the filter menu at
the top.
Like adjustment layers, this ensure you can make changes later on.
Once converted, head back up to the filter menu, down to ‘Noise’
and then ‘Add Noise’. You want to add a nice subtle amount of noise, just enough
so you can tell that there's noise.
Somewhere around 10 percent for this photo should work well.
Now that we have a little bit of noise,
let's add one more affect. Double-clicking on your main photo to
bring up the layer styles,
let's add an inner shadow to rough up the edges, change the blend mode to ‘Color
Burn’,
and decrease your opacity to around 65 percent
Set the distance at zero, and then crank the size up until you're happy with the
way the edges are looking.
And that'll complete it. From here you can easily make additional changes if
necessary.
This is why stress working with adjustment layers. I can easily select
the black-and-white adjustment
and add a tint if I want to, or I can change the blend mode on the adjustment layer
to hard light:
adding a splash of color back into the photo while still keeping it retro.