Our friend Kathy took this awesome photo (above) of G Noodle at the water park the other day. She did some magic tweaking and manipulating to the photo and got a really nice look that kind of resembled a photograph taken in the 70’s.
You know the look right? That Calvin Klein, American Apparel, vintage 70’s, green hue, shag carpet look. Old photographs taken in the late 60’s and 70’s. A lot of the Chemical Brothers and Boards of Canada album covers are in that style.
I think there is something appealing about those old photographs that digital photography is missing. The faded imperfect colors, dust, scratches and blurriness add character and a deeper story to the images. Maybe it’s my 30 something nostalgia talking.
Kathy’s photo got me thinking the style might be kind of cool to emulate myself in photoshop. Being able to come up with a look and feel that makes the viewer question if the photo was a digital photograph or not may come in handy during future adventures.
I did the usual Google search and found a few good pages. Looks like people have wondered how to get the look before.
The website Photo.net has a couple of good forums on the topic. On one of the pages someone presented an artist named Heidi Johansen from Norway as an example. Her photos hit the 70’s style right on the noggin. These were newer photographs made to look like they were old (I think). Her stuff might not be digital photography though.
One of the good places to start that someone suggested, is to get a good definition down of what exactly you are trying to achieve. What are the characteristics of a photograph that make you think it was taken in the 70’s and not present day?
One of the main characteristics of an older photo I think is that there is very low contrast to the images. There doesn’t seem seem to be any area that is 100% black and no areas that hit 100% white.
The colors are faded. There seems to be a green or an earth tone hue.
Someone said in one of the posts that it is a saturated but subdued look.
Low sharpness.
If one wanted to investigate even further, I found pages on the nets where they were discussing the type of film being used at the time and the methods used to produce the prints. That plus the number of years stacking up is of course the real reason the photos look like they do.
You almost have to do the opposite of everything one would do to make a nice digital photograph. It’s kind of an amateur, old time, family photo album look I guess.
If you were to make a truly convincing vintage digital photo for a movie set or a fashion shoot your subject matter would look and preferably be dressed in period attire. I think that’s part of why the Johansen photos are so convincing. There aren’t many clues as to what year they were taken. The people look like they could be from the 70’s. Friend Matt said that was because everyone over in the Scandinavian counties already all look like they are living in the 70’s.
Here’s the recipe of what I did to the image of cousin Hannah and G Noodle up top there:
In photoshop I began my 70’s conversion by taking the contrast down quite a bit using the brightness and contrast filter. I took the contrast down at least -20. I’m beginning to think that the more contrast you can take out without it looking too weird, the better.
A note here: I did all of my color manipulating on several different adjustment layers so as to not lose the original file. I could then also go back and adjust the different layers back and forth to tweek the final outcome.
Then I went into the channel mixer and clicked on the green output channel. There I added +28% to the red source channel and +6% to the blue source channel. I also added +2% to the constant slider bar. In the red output channel took out -4% from the green source channel and added +20% to the constant there. I’m not sure what the constant is?
Yes, I am eyeballing it and stopping when I think it gets to the tone I am after.
About this time during the process I am noticing that the whites are really blowing out.
The next thing to then do is bring the whites back down. I did this by adding a levels adjustment layer. In levels I pulled the white point arrow in and did some adjust of the midlevel arrow. Try to leave the black point where it is for now so the blacks stay dull. Here we are just trying to make it so the whites aren’t so bright.
After that I duplicated the background layer. Now I had a new copy of the photo with the original layer underneath. I then blurred the whole new layer using a gaussian blur with a pixel radius of 3.0.
With the background copy all nice and blurred up, I create a layer mask on that layer. With the layer mask selected I then used the eraser brush tool and erased out the parts of the blur that I didn’t want. Set your eraser to like a 20% opacity so you can slowly and softly paint out the blur. I kept all of the blur in the background and erased all the blur off of the babies faces and most of their bodies. The blur pops them out more.
I added another layer on which I made a blurry dark colored frame around the edges of the image. The selection was in like 150 pixels and feathered. I then set the dark frame layer to multiply on the blending mode menu. Now the dark frame created a shadowy frame around the photo.
I then added a layer mask to the dark frame layer and erased out the parts of the frame I didn’t want like I did with the blur layer.
I’m not sure about the dark frame. I don’t know if it really adds much to the finished piece.
The final step is to add noise and dirty the photo up to give it that aged feel. I used dust and scratches from the noise filters. I gave them a radius of 5 and a threshold of 75.
I think I will probably add actual dust, scratches and blemishes to future photos I work on. I didn’t dirty these examples up much at all.
So that it is pretty much how I attempted it myself. I kept adjusting the colors back and forth on these after the fact. You can really spend a lot of time tweaking.
I think it’s a pretty cool look. I might do a group of photos in that style so I have a little series of images. I think a bunch of them together would look great.
Let me know what you think. I would love to hear any of the methods that you are using to get the look. Also links to other’s work would be cool too.
