Some of you visiting have show interest in the worn look I've added to some of the latest photos.
And since I love my visitors (especially those leaving comments/feedback). I have decided sharing is caring.
Disclaimer!
By this little text I will try to teach some of my techniques as small quick tutorials.
I will try to explain as good as I can, and hope to make it easy enough to be understandable.
I'm sorry if I skip instructions on the way, ask if you can't follow.
I probably take some knowledge for granted in Photoshop.
And for some of you, this will be very basic stuff. Feel free to comment if you have a better technique.
Most things can be done in many ways in Photoshop.
The guide
- You need a photo to start with of course
- Then you need a worn texture (more about where to find these further down)
- In Adobe Photoshop: Drag texture to Photo creating a new layer above the one with the photo. Resize with free transform as needed.
Then set the layer blending mode to screen and adjust the Opacity to a value which works for the photo.
- (This is an optional step). By adding an adjustment curve and increase the contrast in the photo,
you can make the texture stand out a bit more. To add an adjustment layer, do this:
Click in menu (or use shortcut from the layer-palette): Layer / New Adjustment Layer/ Curves...
Give the curve a basic S-shape to add some more contrast.
The excellent thing about adjustment layers is because they are non destructive to the photo.
This means no changes are made on the actual photo and whatever you adjust, it's possible to re-adjust later on.
Since it's a layer you can also reorder it with the other layers or turn it on/off or adjust opacity for finetuneing the effect.
I work with adjustment layers and ordinary layers most of the time to be able to go back and forth trying different settings.
Now for some links to some excellent textures you can start with:
Lost and taken: old film textures color edition
Lost and taken: 11 old and grungy film textures
The Darkroom blog by Really Japan: Dusty textures
If you find this any useful I can probably do some more miniguides in the future.
I have some ideas of miniguides about lightpainting, how I sharpen a image or perhaps workflow for faked tilt-shift.
I sincerely hope you have learned something, at least not to let random people on the internet waste your time :)
