apply a vintage look to photos

Create impressively vintage-looking photos in just a few minutes

Add an ageing effect to your photos in minutes

If there’s one thing to be grateful for about modern photography, it’s that digital photos are nothing if not

consistent. When photographers shot on film, all sorts of variables – from the age of the film, to the humidity in which it was used, as well as other factors – affected how images turned out once they were processed. Even in perfect conditions, different films could produce very different looking images. These days, one image from a decent digital sensor will turn out, assuming the same settings, roughly the same as another. If you’re shooting raw photos, that often means rather flat images; even if you allow your camera to apply a few JPEG tweaks to the picture, you still won’t get an enormously different image.

For reportage photographers this is an enormous blessing: images can be produced safe in the knowledge that colours will be accurate, details will be sharp and that images won’t be rejected by picture editors who aren’t sold on the look of a particular type of film.

However, it’s a double-edged sword: images with a ‘vintage’ style hold enormous appeal: given the right subject they can be enormously evocative. Just look at the overjoyed reaction by photographers when Kodak announced in January that it was planning on bringing back its Ektachrome film by the end of 2017. There’s certainly plenty of evidence of the enduring popularity of vintage-style images on photo sharing sites such as Instagram, where the most popular filters peg back the contrast and saturation of images to produce finished shots that look older than they are.

Tools of the trade

Modern photographers can have the best of both worlds: capturing accurate, realistic images in their camera and then selectively editing the most interesting ones to be given a vintage makeover. Of course, there are plenty of one-shot filters out there to do the job in a single click (we really like VSCO’s range of free filters; see apple.co/2iCZULT), but there

Learning to do this manually is very useful in developing editing skills

are lots of benefits to learning to do the job manually. The style you apply can be varied slightly with each image, and learning to control different aspects of an image is very useful to developing your image-editing chops.

Here, we’ll use Affinity Photo to produce an aged, vintage-style effect on carefully selected images, making the most of both our editing skills and the source material. This is a preset-free zone: you’ll do everything using standard image-editing tools and tricks, so you can turn the intensity of the effect up or down to suit your image.

In doing this, it’s best to use adjustment layers. These sit on top of your image, rather than permanently changing its original pixels. That means there’s less chance of damaging that original file (always possible if you shoot JPEG rather than raw files), and changes can be revised. Affinity Photo’s Live Filter Layers are a similar tool, which work the same way but make groups of edits to an image in order to produce a particular effect.

The second thing to bear in mind is that it’s good practice to work in Affinity Photo’s own file format. This is the default option when you first press ç+S, and means you’ll be working in a non-destructive format. Only create a JPEG when you don’t want to make further changes, by choosing File > Export.

Our aim is to produce a weathered, washed-out effect – as if a photo has sat in the sun for decades. Our two main tasks are to introduce a slight colour cast – shifting all the colours in the image slightly – and reduce the image’s contrast, so there’s less difference between the brightest and darkest parts. While this will result in a picture that’s flatter and less dramatic than the original, in concert with the colour cast and a few other bells and whistles (such as a very subtle vignette and perhaps some digitally-introduced dust and scratches), you should end up with a shot that really looks the part.

The picture we’ve chosen, of an old Soviet sculpture in Moscow, is perfect for this kind of treatment. The subject matter is antiquated, and as with many images that benefit from slightly more ambitious editing, the light the image was shot in was pretty poor, resulting in quite an underwhelming image.

Accelerated ageing

Reducing contrast is a good starting point. In Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/ Contrast Adjustment, you’ll drag the contrast slider to the left, which will flatten the image slightly. Don’t go too far, as that will make the image look a little hazy; stick to a relatively restrained leftwards pull. Close the dialog and

note the Layers palette on the right-hand side of the app. The bottommost layer is your original image, and the adjustment is the one above it, which you can rename to something more descriptive name by clicking it.

Clearing the check box to the right of the adjustment layer will disable its effect – handy if you want a reminder of how things looked without it. To tweak an adjustment layer’s settings, double-click the layer. As we’ll make multiple adjustment layers in the same image, it’s useful to bear that ability in mind.

The basics of colour correction – used here for the opposite of their normal job of bringing a photo’s colours into closer line with reality – are simple. Choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Colour Balance Adjustment and decide how you want your image to look. You can rebalance it using the sliders – make it more blue and it’ll simultaneously become less yellow. More red equals less cyan, and so on. At this point it’s worth researching historical or vintage images and deciding precisely what style to ape – unless you’ve got an innate feel for exactly what makes a ‘vintage’ picture, it’s worth formulating a plan before you dive in.

Our final image here uses a neat scratch overlay. You can make these in Affinity Photo, but, as ever, heroes on the internet have done it for you. Head to bit.ly/2k0I5Mj to download a pack of overlays that apply a subtle finishing touch to vintage images.