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Give your digital photos classic appeal

by Amy Palermo

Application(s): Adobe Photoshop CS2/CS3/CS4/CS5

Operating System(s): Microsoft Windows, Macintosh

At A Glance:
Painting and illustration techniques are great effects to enhance photographs, but sometimes you want a subtler look. Take for instance this simple technique, which will give your images a timeless look.
 
To enhance your photos with this “classic look” technique, we’ll:

• Duplicate the image and make modifications to create a layer with a sketchy look.
• Combine the two documents and darken the sketchy layer to make it bold.
• Apply a layer blending mode for a classic look.  

Not everything you do in Photoshop has to be glitter and glam. Sepia tints, vignettes, and simple edge effects are a few ways you can enhance your photos with a classic look. Follow along and we’ll show you another great way to give your images a boost. And, as shown in Figure A, you won’t take anything away from your photo’s intrinsic charm.

Figure A:

Grab a photo

You can use any photo for this technique but we chose to focus on photographs of people. So many artistic techniques modify the character in portraits. This one, on the other hand, lends itself to retaining that character. To follow along with our example, download the file oldfashion.zip from the URL given at the beginning of this article, extract the file baseball.jpg, launch Photoshop, and open the file shown in Figure B. (Images provided by PhotoSpin. Some images modified for educational purposes.)

Figure B:

Set up the document

For this technique you’ll need to create a duplicate of the original image and modify that duplicate. So to begin we’ll set up the duplicate file and make those modifications.

To create a duplicate file:

1.

Choose Image > Duplicate and click OK in the Duplicate Image dialog box, shown in Figure C. The image you will be working on for now is the baseball copy.jpg file.

Figure C:

1.

Drag the Background layer to the Create A New Layer button at the base of the Layers panel to duplicate the Background layer.

2.

With the Background copy layer selected, choose Image > Adjustments > Desaturate.

3.

Drag the desaturated Background copy 2 layer to the Create A New Layer button to duplicate the Background copy 2 layer, as shown in Figure D.

Figure D:

1.

Choose Image > Adjustments > Invert for results shown in Figure E.

Figure E:

1.

Set the layer blending mode to Color Dodge, as shown in Figure F. This will make the Background copy 2 layer appear white if you are working on our sample file. Other images may show some black still, but the image will no...