Click the icon to download the action. If you want to know what the action does, then read on.

How it works

Start off with the basic image

Add a Gradient Map adjustment layer

Choose the “Copper” gradient, which should be in the default set

Make sure you tick “Reverse” and “Dither”

Set the adjustment layer blend mode to “Soft Light”

That’s it! It results in a nice, slightly vintage look, which is subtle enough to not need any further adjusting, most of the time. Obviously it’s not suitable for every photo – it warms the colours, so if the photo is already quite warm (for example, an indoors photo, with no flash), then it will likely ruin the picture.

I have the action set to one of the function keys (F6), so I can quickly press that to see how the photo looks with the slight vintage colours.

Before looking at some more before and after shots, I suggest experimenting with Gradient Maps yourself. Load some of the other gradients that come with Photoshop and scroll through them with the arrow keys. The image should update in real-time so you can see how the different gradients look on the photo.

More examples

Video

High resolution version

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:

Another GIMP tutorial. Based on the earlier Photoshop version showing how to get vintage colours using Curves. I’ve tried to recreate it almost exactly – even used the same photo.

The recording process went surpringly well in Ubuntu. I didn’t even need to take it into Vegas for editing. Just recorded with Xvidcap at 640x480px 30fps then added the music and fade out at the end with Avidemux.

And because I uploaded it at the full resolution, you can watch the video in high quality on Youtube if you add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL (Thanks Lifehacker).

Or you can just click here to view the high quality version.