Photoshop Tutorials – Vintage Photo Effect

Greetings websters, and thanks for tuning in again for another installment of our Burning Oak Studios Tutorials to get your learn on! Today I would like to discuss how to accomplish a vintage photo effect in Adobe Photoshop.

To start, we are going to need a photograph. I grabbed mine from Stock.xchng, you can pick that up here if you would like to follow along in Photoshop.

The goal here, is to change this photograph in a manner so that it will appear older than it actually is, and to add a subtle sharpness to it that is not present in the original photo. Below you can view the before and after images.





First things first, open the image in Adobe Photoshop and go ahead and double-click on the “background” layer to unlock/rename it. With that done, we now need to start using a few adjustments layers to get the effect that we want.



Click on the New Adjustment Layer button in the layers panel (you can also do this by clicking Layer > New Adjustment Layer), and select Levels. Basically we want to bring in the lights and darks closer to the middle by using the sliders to carefully adjust these settings. Don’t go overboard here, we just need subtle changes.





Next, we need to add another adjustment layer, this time Photo Filter. Click on the “Filter” drop box and select Sepia, and drag the density adjustment slider over to around 95%.





And now we need to add a Curves Adjustment Layer. These are also VERY subtle changes, so pay attention to what I’ve done in the image and be sure to not go crazy with these settings either.





Now we can see that the image is really starting to shape up and look the way we want it to. There’s another very helpful effect that can be applied to bring out this image even further. It’s as simple as using the Sharpen filter. I however, like to use the Smart Sharpen option as it yields more settings and refinement possibilities. So, as in the other steps, pay attention to what I’ve done in the image to get the same sort of effects I got in my final product.





Now we have a sharp, and vintage looking image. Thanks for joining us for this tutorial and look forward to more helpful techniques & effects in the near future.