Give Your Photo a Vintage Look

While photography has come along way in the past 30 or 40 years people still like the look of vintage photographs. The vintage look shows up in magazines, on websites and in advertisements. This tutorial will show you how to take any photograph and give it that vintage look. If you don't have a photograph right now then feel free to download the one I have used in this tutorial.







Step One

First, open your photo in Photoshop, if you need to do any touching up then do so now. Good vintage photos come from good original photos so make sure it looks it's best.

Step Two

Go to your "Image" menu and then to the "Adjustments" menu and click on "Color Balance". Here you will see a few sliders, at the bottom there are check boxes for Shadows, Mid tones, and Highlights. Click on "Midtones", at the top are 3 boxes, change these settings to:
+50, 0, -20

It should look something like this:



Step Three
Go back to the "Image" menu, then to "Adjustments" and now click on "Hue/Saturation". At the top it should say "Master", use the drop down menu to change that to "Blues" and change the "Saturation" setting to -40

It should now look a bit like this:



We're almost done!

Step Four

The last thing we really want to do is to lighten some of the shadows to simulate a poor exposure. Go back to the "Image" menu, then "Adjustments" and click on "Levels". At the bottom of the Levels menu there is a part called "Output Levels" and should have two boxes, one that says 0 and one that says 255. Change the "0" setting to 10.

It should look like this:



We're all done! If you want you can crop the picture to be more square like and then add a frame to make it look like the first picture above. This techniques is simple and works well on a wide range of photos.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Related Tutorials: How to Make Your Photos Look Antique

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