CREATIVE PHOTOSHOP Turn back the clock

James Paterson shows how to age your images with retro borders, light leaks and soft corners

Retro effects are very much in vogue at the moment. It seems that, with modern cameras offering us crystal-clear picture quality, the appeal of analogue imperfections have gone through the roof. Those little errors can make pictures seem so much more individual.

There are lots of ways to give your image an aged look in Photoshop, and while it’ll take a little longer than instant smartphone apps, the results are far more unique.

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to rough up a brand new image by adding a grubby border and dirty texture. We’ll also mimic the effects of a light leak by adding orange colouring, giving the impression that light has seeped through the gaps in a cheap camera body to fog the edges of the film. Along the way we’ll encounter fundamental Photoshop skills like blend modes, selections, filters and masks.

Each stage in the workflow remains editable at any point, and once you’ve done it once, you can try the effect out on any image simply by duplicating the layers. Here’s how...