Simple way to add an old-school Hollywood effect to a boring image.
Very quick and easy tutorial, but nice to have on hand.
First things first, your image, I have this picture of a downtown. Pretty bland, nothing special about it.
(image from yotophoto.com <-- great first place to look for free stock photos)
The first thing you want to do is add a little bit of grain to the image. To do this duplicate the photo into a new layer, and go to filter > add noise .
I put my noise at 11 % but this is going to depend on the picture... After you add the noise, adjust the opacity so you don't see the individual grains anymore, and it looks more like an older picture. I dropped the opacity to 55%.
Next, lets modify the image to make it look like it came from a camera with a different lens. We do this by adjusting the focus of the picture. For the most
part my whole picture is in focus, minus the buildings in the background. I am going to greatly shrink that focus to the natural focal point at the end of the
street.
So, create another new layer of your original image. Then we are going to blur this layer. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. This tool creates an even blur across
the whole image, set your radius anywhere from 2-3 pixels. Then press OK and see the result.
This next technique will later be used on your noise layer so make sure you do it right. Create a layer mask (in your layers palette you can press the 3rd
butt on from the left, a white circle on a grey rectangle backdrop) . If you are not familiary with layer masks you will now see a white ractangle to the right of
the layer you have selected. By clicking on this white rectangle you are not working on the mask layer and the white part is what part of that layer will
show, if you paint a black on top, that area you painted black will look like it was erased from the image.
Anyways grab your paintbrush tool, make sure a black color is selected, and that you have a big brush. What you are going to do is go towards the end of
the street (in my case) and spray some black. As you can see the blur is gone and that part looks in focus. Now just by eye paint out a good circular area
that will be in focus, and fade the rest to the blur. This may take a couple times to do it right, but you will eventually see something similar to mine.
You can see in this image how the layer mask is working...
Now lets go ahead and do the same thing with the 'noise' layer you made earlier, but don't do it as severely, we want to have some noise throughout the
image, maybe just a little bit less in the focus of the photo. So drop the flow of your paint before you throw it on there.
Now, lets make it older by taking out some of the color.
New layer on top of everything, fill it with black, and set the mode (at the top of the layers palette) to color. Everything is black and white now. Now
depending on how the color in your image is you can mess with this, but drop the opacity of that color layer to 50-70%, mine is 60.
Your taking out some of the color but not all of it. Finally, perform a similar process to the layer masks earlier, but you can just use an erase straight on the
black page. Take out some (not all) of the black from the focus of the image, and then there is a little bit more vivid colors down there.
Now black bars don't really work for my image, because its so vertical, but they really look good on a horizontal one.
And your done... for a little bit extra you can adjust the color to throw in a little amber or brownish tints that add some old 'film-ish' qualities to it. Without the
extra color fading and adding noise this can be used to add perspective to a normal image.
For PSD's e-mail capty99@gmail.com, the full tutorial can also be found at tylerjameslee.com
Other example :
