James Paterson
James Paterson shows you how to age your photos with textures, borders, and colour shifts for a classic look
Photo-editing whiz James teaches Adobe CC and Affinity Photo tricks, plus how to use lighting gels in our Big Project.
There are lots of popular retro phone filters, apps and effects that make it very easy to give photographs the look of an old print. But their popularity means that they can get overused. If you want to craft a refined, original retro effect, then you need to tailor it to the specific image, and this sort of control can only be achieved in proper image editors like Affinity Photo. In this project we’ll show you how to transform a pristine picture into a battered old print with a range of vintage tricks.
Old prints will typically become dirty, scratched and creased over time, and the colours will skew towards green and yellow as the chemicals fade. We can recreate the ravages of time by using a combination of textures and tonal tricks. We’ll begin, in this case, by using an old border as a base for our image, then go on to blend textures and create our very own light leak.
This is a strong discolouration around the edges of the frame, which is something that often happened with cheap old cameras that had gaps around the body. The gaps would allow light inside, which would fog the edges of the rolled-up film.
We can create a similar fogging effect by using a Levels adjustment, then paint a layer mask to control where it occurs around the frame. Each of the edits that we utilize here is applied to a separate layer, which then gives us the option to increase or decrease the strength of any texture or tonal change simply by changing the layer opacity.
Paste and blend
Open retro_01 and 02 into Affinity Photo. Go to the 01 image of the cameras, hit Cmd/ctrl+c to copy, then go to the other image and paste with Cmd/ctrl+v. Go to the Layers panel and change the blend mode from Normal to Screen. Use the Move tool to position the image in the frame.
Mask the frame
Highlight the bottom layer and press Cmd/ Ctrl+j to duplicate, then drag to the top. Grab the Freehand Selection tool and check Polygonal at top left. Set Feather to 1px. Click around the corners to select the frame, then go to Select>invert Pixel Selection. Click the Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel.
Add texture
Paste in the Texture01 image. Make sure it’s below the top frame layer. Set the blend mode to Multiply, click the cog at the top of the Layers panel to open the Blend Options. Drag the Underlying Composition Ranges line down, as shown, to fade out the effect, so it only works over the highlights in frame.
Blend the textures
Lower the layer opacity of the Texture01 layer to around 75%. Next, paste in the Texture02 image and position over the frame, then change the blend mode to Soft Light. Hit 6 to set the layer opacity to 60%. Experiment with the Blend Options to combine the texture with the image.
Make a light leak
Click the Adjustment icon and choose Levels. Click the Master and choose Red, then drag the Output Black Level slider in to add red. Choose Blue and drag the Output White Level slider in to add yellow. Hit Cmd/ Ctrl+i to invert the Levels mask, then paint white to reveal it in the corners.
Skew the colours
Duplicate and reuse the Levels layer to build the light leak. Add a Curves adjustment layer. Drag the bottom-left point up to fade the shadows. Click Master and choose Green, then drag the bottom of the line up and pin back the top part, go to the Blue channel and drag the top down.