To start off my Photoshop tutorials, here is my most popular video tutorial on YouTube.

It’s a very simple trick, but not obvious if you’re new to Photoshop. The trick is understanding how Curves work and it’s not specific to Photoshop – you can use curves in Paintshop pro and GIMP for example. One notable exclusion seems to be Photoshop Elements, which can’t do this trick because Elements don’t have Channels (i.e. Red, Green and Blue channel alphas that make up the colours in the image).

This tip uses the elusive Curves function. Curves are very powerful and allow more subtle adjustments in contrast and brightness than Levels or the basic Brightness/Contrast functions. But unless you’re told about it, or read about it in a tutorial, it’s not really clear what it would do. I know that I didn’t ever used curves in the first few years I used Photoshop, and it took a couple more years to realise that the individual colour channels could be edited.

This tutorial isn’t an introduction to Curves though and if you watched the video above, then you already know what to do. I’m going to try and explain why it works here.

Basically, it works because Photoshop has channels. In Photoshop, you can see the channels on the little tab next to the Layers pallet (by default, anyway). There you will see a colour version of your image followed by three black and white versions. These black and white versions are actually red, green and blue versions of your images (when in RGB mode).

As an example, look at the image below.

You can see the red spot is brightest in the red channel, the green is brightest in the green channel and so on.

Now, if we were to edit just the red channel, as in the video, by dragging the brightest level of red down, and the darkest level of it up, the red channel will lose the white and black areas. It will become mostly grey.

Because we’ve made the blackest areas of the red channel brighter, in the full colour version, the previously black background is a dark red.

And because we’re made the whitest areas of the red channel darker, in the full colour version, the previously bright red is now duller shade.

That’s basically it, in a rather long-winded way. If you’re going to try this yourself, editing the red and blur channels works best for getting a vintage effect. Also remember to use the Curves function as an Adjustment Layer rather than just going to Image > Adjustments > Curves or CTRL+M as you will be able to edit it later on or fade the effect more easily or even mess around with blend-modes.

Anyway, that’s my first tutorial for lukeroberts.us – hope you found it useful.

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