Photoshop Tutorials: Creating a naturally original vintage effect on your photos

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Photoshop alone has extremely tons of features that you can use to enhance your photos. You can do almost everything you want out of your photos. One simple but highly effective thing it can do is to transform your regular photo to make it look like more vintage but in the most natural way possible. Say goodbye to those mobile apps that do the work for you; be a Photoshop expert and create your vintage photos manually. Here is how you can accomplish that.


Before going on with the tutorial, we just want to tell all of you that what we will be teaching you are basic stuff so experiment on your own will if you want something more out of what we are about to teach you. The lesson is just to up the ante for you folks to have a better view of how you can create vintage retro effects on your photos. So let’s begin.

Step 1: Use a Gradient Map

So the first thing you want to do is to add a gradient map on the photo that you want to transform to vintage. To do this, go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map. From here, you can choose different colors of gradients and to arrive at the vintage style, choose the blue, yellow, blue gradient and tick the reverse colors box to reverse the colors.

What this does is that if the color blue is dominant, the yellow color will replace the blue colors and thus making the yellow shade more dominant in this effect.

Step 2: Tweak features

After doing these, change the opacity from 100% to 30-40% depending on how you like it. This will make subtle but effective changes to your photo. This adds the yellowish feature on your photos.


You can also tweak the inner shadows by going to the layer style window. To do this, double-click the layer of the image in the layers panel or simply, right click the layer in the layers panel and select Blending Options.

You will see a lot of options, options like: Contour, Texture, Stroke, and so on. Select the option Inner Shadows. You can try lots of styles and one best design you can do is to apply the color burn blend mode. You can experiment on these to get the effects that you want.

One thing you can additionally do is to apply Gradient Overlay style. You can also see this option in the layers style window. Set the blend mode to Overlay and it should be fine. Again, you can tweak it to your liking.

Step 3: Add Texture

For this step, you can download and search for some textures because we all know that texture is a key element of vintage design. You can choose and use any texture that you want. To add this to the photo, open the new image and set it on top of the image that you’re using. Adjust the opacity to somewhere around 20-30% and it should be embedded now.

Step 4: Experiment

From the very first step, you can go ahead and experiment on different colors, different designs that would tailor-fit your taste and liking. You can try different colors, try on different designs, add different textures, and so on.

Now that you know how to create a vintage effect on your photos, time to put it to use. What are your thoughts about this? Were we able to help you? Let us know in the comments section below.

For more Photoshop Tutorial visit our Photoshop archives.


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