How to Age a Photo Using Photoshop

My wife happens to be a collector too – and while I tend to go for mass-produced action figures from the big toy companies, she is a lot more discriminating. For example, take her collection of Monkey Assassins, from Wunderland War. These urban vinyl figures are produced in very limited runs, usually below 100 or 200 figures total.

The picture I took reminded me very much of those old family photo from days gone by. You seldom see them these days, and certainly not of a secretive clan of monkey assassins. However, it felt that a group shot of a secretive clan of monkey assassins might have not been so out of place 50+ years ago. So I thought to myself, could I transform the picture to make it look like something out of the 50’s. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1 – Take a picture. Here’s  the original shot. This is from my standard set up of 2 lights on the sides of a white nylon light-diffusing photo cube. I knew how to do start, but not what to do next. So, I did what any sensible person would do who knew what he wanted but didn’t know how to do it – I did a google search for “how to age a photo in photoshop” and found this tutorial.

Step 2 – Add a Hue and Saturation layer. You’ll want to colorize the photo and adjust the hue so you get a nice sepia tone.

Step 3 – Add a glow. Create a new layer, and then merge what’s visible – that layer will just show the sepia tone you created in the first step. Then use a heavy gaussian blur, change the blending mode of that layer to overlay, and reduce the opacity. This will add a nice glow to your picture.

Step 4 – Darken the edges. The tutorial suggests that old pictures get darker on the edges. Create a new layer and fill it with black. Then take your elliptical selection tool and select an ellipse to the edges of the photo. Create a layer mask, revealing the center of the shot, and then apply another heavy gaussian blur. Reduce the opacity of the edges layer by a lot, and you get a subtle darkening at the edges of the shot.

Step 5 – Add noise. In this step and the next, we’re going to add scratches to make the photo look a bit beat up. Create a new layer and fill it with black. Then use the noise filter to add noise. Change the blending mode to soft light, and greatly reduce the opacity.

Step 6 – Add grain. Create another new layer filled with black. This time, use the texture filter to add a vertical grain. Change the blending mode to screen, which removes the black and leaves only the white dots in the vertical grain.

Step 7 – Adjust the levels. Old photos fade, so we’re going to adjust the levels on the picture to subtly reduce the contrast in the image. Use the output sliders to do this, increasing the value for the black slider and reducing the value for the white slider.

Step 8 – Add back in a hint of color. For the final touch we’ll want to add in a hint of color from the original photograph. You do this by slightly reducing the opacity of the Hue and Saturation layer we added in the first steps of this process. You’ll want to do this to suit your tastes.

And there you have it – the Monkey Assassin Clan, circa the 1950s. I hope you can apply these techniques to your photos when you want to give them a vintage quality.

Please visit the Turn A New Photo Into An Old Photo In Photoshop for a more in depth, step-by-step guide on aging photos using Photoshop.