Tutorial: Vintage look

By Dirk Metzmacher

The internet holds numerous articles and workshops about optimizing and restoring old photographic material. But it is far more exciting and creative to turn fresh photos from your digital camera into old and aged pictures. A little noise and coloration are not enough, though. You will also need some vignetting, scratches and a realistic base.

The objective

We will choose a suitable motif (current fashion and cars are rather unsuitable), then age it for years, step by step. First open the document in Photoshop and trim it with the crop tool if needed. Hold the Shift key to get a perfectly square result. Keep some space around the desired motif because we will need room for a frame. The example shows our objective: Aged photos.

Blurriness

Old photographs have a certain fuzziness. First we change the background layer into a normal layer. To do that, hold the Alt key and double click on the layer. Duplicate it with Layer > New > Layer via Copy or by pressing Ctrl+J.

The Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur takes care of the blur. Only some details should become blurred. A radius of 0.5 to 2 should be enough. Give the layer a mask.

In order to do that, you could press the Add Layer Mask button in the layer palette or click the menu Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All. Next to the layer thumbnail you will see a new thumbnail for the mask. Use the gradient tool to draw a radial gradient in it. You can select the form of the gradient in the options panel.

You should use a black-to-white gradient in a way that makes an important image element lie in focus and that lets the rest softly disappear in a blur. Hint: Sometimes the gradient is simply the wrong way around. So if the desired area suddenly appears blurred, try hitting Ctrl+I on the keyboard to invert the gradient’s direction.

Grain effect

Old films always used to show a little grain, too. Reduce all layers to a single layer with Layer > Merge Visible and copy it by dragging it onto the New Layer button or by using the shortcut Ctrl+J. Filter > Noise > Add Noise with the settings Amount: 11%, Uniform and Monochromatic will get you the desired grain effect.

You can further refine it by changing the layer’s blending mode from Normal to Soft Light. In our example the colors were also enhanced this way, which is desired this time. This version could be from the 1960s.

Sepia look

The sepia look takes us even farther back in time. We reduce the layer with the one below it and click on the menu Image > Adjustments > Black & White. The Auto button gives good results which can be optimized with the numerous sliders. The Tint function in the dialog window gives color to our image. Set the color and saturation according to taste.

Vignette

Even older pictures show a vignette, a shadowing towards the edges of the image. Create a new layer with Layer > New > Layer or with Shift+Ctrl+N. Do a Select > All or Ctrl+A and create a frame with Edit > Stroke and the settings Width: 20 to 40 pixels, Location: Inside and black color. The Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of about 30 pixels turns the frame into a vignette. After confirming with OK and removing the selection you can reduce the layers down to a single layer.

Textures

The result up to now still looks too much like Photoshop. In order to bring some reality into our composition we put a few textures on top of it. Surfaces like that can be found at www.sxc.hu, for example, if you search for Old Paper. In order to blend the structures with our image we will use several blending modes. In this case Multiply was used for light structures and Soft Light for darker areas.

Background

A scan of an old photo can serve as the base for our image. First we select the old content with the Polygon Lasso tool, then bring it onto its own layer with Layer > New > Layer via Copy or Ctrl+J. The composition we created is positioned on its own layer above that and adapted to the form with a clipping mask.

You can create such a clipping mask with Layer > Create Clipping Mask or by holding the Alt key and clicking on the line between two layers in the layer palette. If necessary, adust the colors according to the base image. The corrections Hue/Saturation and Color Balance might help.