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Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to create a vintage instagram Matte Photo in Photoshop

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we are going to make some vintage style Instagram, filter looking images. So this is before, and that's after. We'll do another example here. Before. After. Let's jump in now and work out how to do it. 
Let's open up our file; 'File', 'Open'. We're going to be using 'Vintage 01'. Thank you, Frankie Cordoba. I picked this image because it's kind of retro already. It's got some sweet 90s kicks on and it's not like a professional photograph. It doesn't matter, the photograph you pick. Now I'm going to show you my techniques, but just know that everyone has their own kind of opinion on what an old vintage photograph looks like. You saw mine at the beginning, so if you like that, follow along but you might find steps that you can cut out or enhance. It depends on your image, and how kind of retro you want it. I was born in the 80s, so retro for me might be different from you. 
First thing, let's do that kind of Instagram look where we get the Matte Black. So with 'Background Layer' selected go to 'Adjustments', and let's go to 'Levels'. And before, what we were doing with levels is we spent time trying to make it really sharp black and sharp white, but the vintage look, really the opposite. We're going to use these two little sliders down there we haven't used before. You grab this one and yank-- I'm going to go way too far, can you see, it just yanks out some of the black. So I'm yanking out the black, turn those levels on and off. Get it to a level where you like it, maybe the same with the whites. Just means older cameras just didn't have good white balance and photographs had a tendency to be a bit washed out. We kind of want to recreate that now, cameras have got to good. 
The other thing is, I want to get this kind of like over crazy sharp look. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to duplicate background. I'm right-clicking it. Duplicate, this is going to be my Sharp Layer. There's a couple of ways of getting the sharpness. You can use, under 'Sharpen', there's a bunch of stuff. I like this one here, under 'Other'. We're going to 'High Pass'. I'm only showing you this one now it's because we're further on in the course and we were getting a little bit more extreme. So what we're looking for is, we don't want to go too far where you can start seeing it, you want this kind of, like this bit, where you can see the edges are kind of overdone. Click 'OK'. So this High Pass Filter, doesn't really work at the moment but with Sharp Layers selected we're going to play around with one of these Blending Modes. I want to scroll through in terms--
You can start to see some of them. It really depends on what you want to do, right? I am zooming in. If you want this kind of Color Burn look, it's cool. It's not what I want in this case, I'm looking for Hard Light, already practiced but you can see what I'm doing. I'm just kind of like accentuating all the kind of-- removes all of the Gray Tones. There's a lot more strong blacks and strong whites without any of the Gray Tones; I like it. Gives that kind of ghosty effect around some of the sharper edges. Kind of bleeds out. Again, you can turn that one on or off depending on what you want to do. 
The next one that I like is giving it that kind of-- it's more fashioned, but it looks really good with these images. Under 'Adjustments', we're going to go to 'Curves', which we haven't used before. Don't worry, looks scary. All I want you to do is switch it to blue. See, there's like a dot in the top right and the bottom left.. It's going to lift it up, and lift this one down. And it gives it that kind of orangey teal kind of fashion look. Turn it on, turn it off. Can you see what I mean? It's got a kind of a sun-bleached fashion look. I like it. 
Last thing we're going to do is a Vignette. Vignette is just the kind of frosting around the outside that happens on older photographs. Even earlier than the 80s. It's a cool effect, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to stick it all the way at the top. I'm going to call this one 'Vignette', which I can never spell. That's close enough. To do a Vignette, easiest way is grab your 'Gradient Tool'. Let's switch it from Linear to 'Radial'. What it's doing is, up the top here I'm going to pick the second option. That's going to make my foreground color blend out to invisible. So pop that back in. So now you need to make sure your foreground color-- at the moment mine is white, yours might be black, so it might look like that. I just want to make sure this foreground color whatever it is, double click it and pick kind of mud brown. Drag my hue slider there.
I clicked in here until I found something muddy and murky. I'm going to click, hold, and drag from the center, out. Yours is probably not doing that, yours is probably doing this. So what you need to do is tick on 'Reverse', then click and drag out. You should get something like this. It's not exactly what I want but with the Vignette Layer selected I'm back at my Move Tool, and I'm going to start messing around with these. Remember the shortcut? Hold 'Shift', hit '+'. You find something you like, you might have to tone it down. I think I like Overlay. I'm just going to tone down the Opacity. So it's not as extreme, see on/off, on/off. I want it a little bit more. That is my flavor of an old Vignette image. 
We'll go a little bit further in the next video but I want to show you how you can kind of maybe do this because there's quite a few little steps, right? I'm going to show you how to do the next image a lot quicker. So let's go and open up, 'File', 'Open', there's one called 'Vintage 02'. Sharon Garcia, thank you very much. Awesome image, I love it. I think the neighbors even had that car. So instead of having to go through that whole process again we can kind of cheat, right? What I'm going to do is I want that layer, I want that layer. Now I'm holding down my 'Shift' key to click the Vignette. Holding 'Shift' and grabbing. I don't need this layer, I'd like to bring the sharp layer but that's specifically for this particular image, just want these top three. You three, grab 'Move Tool', click, hold, drag. Drag it to this one, wait, wait, come down. Cool, huh? 
Gives me my curves, my levels, the vignette doesn't quite match. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to click off, grab the 'Vignette' and try and line it up, if it doesn't fit-- hey mine does. Yours is never going to fit, if it doesn't, just Transform it. So 'Command T' on a Mac, 'Control T' on a PC. Just kind of scale it round, yours might be Landscape this time. I'm never that fast, like this doesn't have to be a perfect vignette. Anyway, to get the really cool sharpened thing we'll practice that, right click. Background, duplicate the layer, I'm going to call this one 'Sharp'. And we're going to go to 'Filter'. 
A cool thing about Photoshop is that you can go back into here, and go to High Pass again. Can you see, it's up the top now. This is like a redo button, it says, Photoshop is-- we did this a second ago, do you want to redo this? And I'm like, "Yes, give it a go." That worked, but then I want to blend it again. I can't even remember which one we ended up using. Sharp, where's Hard Light. Over here, it's got a Hard Light. So does make it a little bit easier to kind of know when you can copy and paste these over from document to document. Let's zoom in a little bit, let's look at before and after. You might be less impressed with how vintage this is looking. Again, this is what I feel like is vintage. 
You will find a ton of other videos on YouTube for different ways of doing vintage and you might find those work better for you. One thing we might do to kind of make this look a little bit more legit vintage is to add some dust and scratches, so let's go to 'File', Open'. What I've done for you is I've found this one here called 'dust.png'. If you Google 'dust and scratches ', there's all sorts of stuff online. I liked this one here, so what I'm going to do is grab my 'Move Tool'. Drag it on to this guy. You might have to Scale it, Transform it to get it how you want it to be, how big or large you think this should be. Get your mind just over laying. This is sitting on the top of everything, I'm going to call it 'Dust'. Then I'm going to find a Blending Mode that works. Man, we do lots of Blending Modes, right? It's the real secret super power of Photoshop. 
Now I think the only one that kind of works in this one is Divide. I'm going to lower the Opacity, so I've picked 'Divide' here. The Opacity, I'm going to lower right down. Turn it on, turn off, let's zoom in. Depends on what you want to do, right? That's pretty heavy going with the dust and scratches. You might find another one online that's just a little less over the top. I might now drag this back to my original or the first one we worked on. Sometimes you can't even tell where it is, so I like to hit 'Transform'. 'Command T' on a Mac, 'Control T' on a PC. You can see the edges. Even though I'm not resizing, it's just a nice way to see the edges. How vintage do we look? Let's have a look. We'll completely see them all. Let's move it up a little bit, my layers. After. Before. After. I like it. That is going to be the end of making vintage images. Let's get into the next video.