I’ve been asked to do a few tutorials on some of the ‘vintage’ processing I’ve been doing recently. There’s loads of great techniques for doing this so I thought it might be easier to just pick an image from my portfolio and show you the steps I took. I thought we’d start the image below as it’s fairly simple.
So here’s what we’re starting with.
[click image to view bigger]
First step is to add a curves adjustment layer. There are no hard and fast rules for how to adjust these colours but these are my go-to settings. In the ‘blue channel’ I have pushed quite a lot of blue into the shadows and yellow into the highlights. I do find that my blue channel always seems to end up looking like this so this could be seen as the ‘important’ channel.
I then added more green into the midtones/highlights in the ‘green channel’.
Plenty of cyan into the shadows and a slight boost of red into the highlights.
Next step is to give the image it’s faded toned with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I personally find that a brown/sepia colour works best for me but play around and see what looks good.
The effect is obviously too strong so lower the opacity until the image just looks stained with the brown colour. 50% seemed about right for this image.
Last step is to add a touch of magenta into the midtones and highlights. In this image I used a fill adjustment layer with a bright magenta colour and set the layer blend mode to screen.
It looks pretty horrible with the opacity at 100% so lower to around 10%.
All I did to finish this image was a bit of dodging & burning.
These exact steps won’t work on every image obviously but it’s a fairly good staring point for this kind of toning and does seem to work pretty well on most flat, low contrast images. The great thing about this technique is the variety of tones you can get by just tweaking the hue/saturation layer and playing with opacities. Enjoy!
Guidelines