// irrelevant

I tried browsing the Web, looking for an old time photo tutorial. Really, I would just like to see some real old time photographs, but mostly I just found home-brewed tutorials from people who probably don’t see many of these types of photographs either.

I’m responding to this one in particular. I mention it mostly just because I used the same photo (from PhotoSpin.com, used without permission or scruples).

I was obvioulsy not around in the earlier parts of last century, but I would think it was not so common for photographs to be in color prior to 1963 (Polaroid’s instant color film). He also used a Cut-Out filter which makes it look more like a watercolor effect rather than… whatever effect he was trying to accomplish.

So, here’s a quick “me, too” tutorial. I didn’t use multiple layers or play with layer modes. Just quick and easy. Just a disclaimer – I’m using the GIMP and not Photoshop. Some tool names and parameters might be slightly different, so I’ll do my best to describe why I’m doing what I’m doing and not just telling you to enter exactly what I have.

1) Open photo. If this one needs any further explanation, hit that big glowing button on the front of your PC and go read a book. I used this one (from the sites listed above):

2) I copied the layer just to preserve the original, so I could just click the visibility back on and see where I started from.

3) Adjust saturation down to -100. It should now look like a plain ol’ black & white photo.

4) Noise – Scatter HSV. Holdness = 1, Hue = 0, Saturation = 0, Value = 10. If you’re using Photoshop, I think you can just use Add Noise. Just make to sure to set it to a Gaussian distribution and make it monochromatic. This is another one you don’t need to go crazy with. I just wanted it to look a little grainy.

5) Gaussian Blur. One pixel for both horizontal and vertical. This softens up the noise and takes away some of the sharpness of clean digital photos.

6) Adjust Contrast. I lowered it to -50 to bring out the noise a little more.

7) Colorize. Hue = 50, Saturation = 30, Lightness = 0. Photos tend to yellow with age, so I added a bit of that here. I didn’t go crazy with it on this one because I figured the picture to be “taken” around the ’50s or so. If you’re going for 1850s, go ahead and bump up the saturation as you see fit.

Adjust Levels. Gamma = 1.50. This works well to brighten up the photo. Careful how far down you take the white point. For this photo, anything less than 230 and it really started to lose the detail from the little girl’s dress. I suppose you could raise the black point to make it look more dramatic, but I didn’t think it was necessary for this photo. I raised the gamma because it’s a light-hearted image on a sunny day, so it makes sense to me that it would be a little brighter.

And here’s the result:

Original Image

Old Time Photo Effect

The reason I was browsing around for this effect was to see if there were any ways to improve upon or gain insight for the effect I applied to my Gun screenshot in an earlier post. Here’s what I had going:

Enjoy.