Old - Timey Photos

Creating a persuasive antique effect involves more than just selecting the Sepia function on your digicam. To do it right, you need to replicate the look, lenses, chemicals, and print medium of early photography. Start with the setting itself. Really old photographs were lit exclusively by sunlight, so take your shot outdoors or near a window. Of course, these pictures were always a tad blurry, so the slower your shutter speed, the better. Even then, you'll need to enhance the softness after you get the image into Photoshop by running a Gaussian blur filter set to a radius of 1.5 pixels. The result: a nice, ever-so- slightly out-of-focus look. Now for the finishing touches: Sepia tones weren't the only kind of prints in the day, but they're the only ones that lasted long enough to become antiques. To best replicate the effect, use the desaturating filter in Photoshop, which removes bright hues but retains all of the file's color information. Then drop the brightness to minus 20 and the contrast to minus 40 to fade the image somewhat, and adjust the RGB color levels to create a nice brownish tint. Finally, scan in a lightly crinkled piece of paper -- blank newsprint or paper towels work well -- and layer it over your image (just lower the opacity of the paper layer). Now you're ready to print like it's 1899.