Aviary - Forums

Sticky: Fun with blend modes! - Aging a photo 9 replies

meowza posted 1 year ago

Here's a quick and easy way to take any photo and "age" it in Phoenix using a variety of the layer blend modes.

I started with a photo of a subject that looks as if it'd have existed a long time ago.

First we'll start by giving our image a sepia tone.

To do so, I desaturated the photo a bit.
Very rarely are real aged photographs completely monotone in tint, as many digitally generated sepia images.
So I wanted to fade our photograph's saturation, but not completely.
For this particular image, I dropped the saturation half way.

Assuming darker inks should fade over time as well, I decided to then drop the contrast level and brighten the image up a bit as well.

Now to add the brownish tone.
On a new layer, I selected a brownish color and used the Paint bucket tool to fill in the entire layer solid.
Then applied the Overlay layer blend mode, and set this layer's Alpha to 44%.

I then flattened the image, and dropped the saturation level of the entire picture a tad more.

meowza posted 1 year ago

When I was happy with the general look of the image, it was time to add textures.
First I wanted to give the photo a roughly aged texture.
So I took the image of the textured paper on the left and pasted it on top of our photograph.
I applied the Multiply blend mode to this. I then copied this layer and applied the Overlay blend mode to the copied layer.
I found this gave me a real nice base to start from.

To add to the aging effect even more, I thought, hey, why not give it some water damage.
So I placed an image of water droplets over a portion of the image on a new layer, then applied the Multiply blend mode.

And to even further add to the effect, I wanted to include general wear and tear.
So I took the grunged image shown on the left, placed that on a new layer and applied the Screen layer blend mode.
And that was that.

And for a final added effect, I flattened the entire image and laid it on top of an old blank photo background.

Egg file

Just another really, really easy but neato thing you can do with a few blend modes! Experiment!

tonytordillos posted 1 year ago

Thanks! This ended up being my first project in Phoenix. I learned a lot :)

StefanMmmh posted 1 year ago

Thank you so much for this tutorial. It got me started, next things can come!

omar954 posted 1 year ago

awesome, this was also my first project in phoenix. it was a really easy tutorial to follow. make more plz!

roseyyz posted 1 year ago

thank you so much.. appreciate your help :o)

maxieonline posted 1 year ago

Thank you very much for this tutorial - although I did not follow all the steps, it was a great inspiration to try something similar and learn on this.