So, I felt like doing a little bit of Photoshopping, so having been playing around with Hipstamatic on my iPhone latety, I thought I would give it a try, and do my own take on a “vintage” photograph.
I ran to my hallway to get a reasonably clear background (note to self: remove stuff on the wall next time), and I snapped this picture handheld with no flash or anything:
After importing I noticed quite a few problems with the image, but didn’t really feel like posing again, so I fixed them using couple of Photoshop techniques:
- I fixed the background using the Lasso Tool and content-aware fill (had to do it a couple of times).
- Then I fixed the skin highlights, by:
- Adding an empty layer above the background and set the blend mode to Darken
- Then using a Healing Brush Tool with Sample set to All Layers and the source set to a nice clean piece of skin I drew over the highlights.
- Used the Clone Stamp Tool to remove the red spot in the right eye.
- I fixed the iris using a Dodge Tool: mid-tones, exposure 50% and doing a couple of twirls on the irises.
- I rounded the pupils using a black Brush Tool (50% hardness).
- I added a new highlight to the pupils using a white Brush Tool (10px, 25% hardness).
This was the result:
Then I needed a nice “grungy” border, so I went Googling until I found this site that had 5 interesting free borders. I picked one, resized it to my pictures dimensions and copied it to the top layer.
The last thing I needed was to make the actual image vintage, so I fired up Alienskin Exposure and looked through the different films, finally deciding on “Kodachrome II” which also included dust and scratches. I turned up the dust and scratch parameters, and almost turned the vignette to the maximum.
The final result:
I am sure there are 100’s of ways to make any Stock images you have look vintage. This was my way. I’d probably do something different another time, but I think it looks pretty good.