Back in 2007, Flickr friend Philippe (or p*) asked me to have a go at adding a “lomo feel” to one of his photos.
So the challenge is I attached a raw file of the shot…you go bananaz on it (by bananas I mean you go nuts w the lomo feel + light leak or whateva you feel like doing to the image)
This is a quick step-by-step of what I came up with.
Camera Raw
I started off with the original RAW CR2 image looking like the above image (mouse-over to see the final image). I almost always shoot in RAW (even with my little IXUS 70), so my work flow usually begins with Camera Raw.
These are the Camera Raw settings I settled on.
Click the icon above to download the Camera Raw settings file. You’ll need to put it into:
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USER NAME\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings
Above is the image straight from Camera Raw. Below is a little animated GIF showing the layers building up.
Photoshop Layers
You can see there are two texture layers, both grayscale and set to Soft Light blend mode. They are both scans from old books and paper I found, but there are plenty of old paper resources around.
The light leaks are described in my Light leaks tutorial. One is Hard Light blend mode, 60% fill, while the other is Linear Light, 51% fill. There are two in order to get the brightness up. It was really just trial and error to see what works. I like to use two layers and adjust them independently.
And finally, Curves. I have made tutorials on how to adjust Curves to get a vintage look for Photoshop and for GIMP.
When I made it, I was pleased with how it turned out. So I saved each layer separately and imported them in to After Effects to show how it worked: