This tutorial will show you how to make photos look antique.
1. Start with a photo.
2. Duplicate the image to keep your background image protected. In the copy later, desaturate the image: Image > desaturate.
3. Now we need to adjust the coloring to a sepia tint. Images > Adjustments > Color balance. The settings will vary from picture to picture and it may take quite a bit of fussing to get it right. You’ll want to adjust the shadows, midtones, and highlights. Here are the numbers I used:
4. My photo still looked a bit red, so I also went into the layers pallet and adjusted the Selective Color.
Before selective color——–> After
5. Sometimes images can look washed out after you give it a sepia tint. You might try changing the blending mode of the second layer to Color and setting the layer opacity to 80%.
6. Make a new layer. In this layer I’m going to use my brush tool and some cool brushes that I downloaded for free to add some cracks and crinkles on the photograph.
7. Alright, here’s where I reached out to my resources. I downloaded an action that adds an antique affect to images. Download it, open it and it should appear in your actions tool bar.
Play the action – you’ll be amazed at how many steps go into this and thankful that you don’t have to do the work! At the end, you’ll have an option to keep layers or merge the image. I strongly suggest keeping the layers.
At the end, I added another selective color layer and removed a layer. The cracks that I added earlier make a big impact in the final result:
