How to Create the LOMO Effect for Your Digital Photos
When the LOMO LC-A camera was first created in the early 1980’s, the photographers regarded it as a poorly-built camera and a poor photo-taker. The configuration of the camera is the main “culprit” for the unique look of the photos taken by it. Due to the unique look, the LOMO photography became immensely popular in the 1990’s and the popularity has been growing ever since. The photos taken by a LOMO camera are distinguishable for their off-kilter exposure, strongly increased saturation and a classic vignette (the photo is dark at the sides and the corners).
Many photographers are particularly passionate about their LOMO cameras, but probably every single one of them has a digital camera and with it the need to make his/her digital photos look like they had been taken with a LOMO. In this tutorial, I’ll try to explain this process and help you LOMOize your photos.
This is how our original image looks like:
We’ll start by creating the vignette on our original image. Select your lasso tool and make a round selection on the image. Make sure to set the Feather value to approximately 1/12 of the image’s Width. For example, the width of the original image that I’m using here is 720 pixels so the feather value that I set was 60px. For an image that is 1024 pixels wide, the feather value should be approximately 85px, etc. The round selection doesn’t have to be at all perfect.
Then you’ll need to invert the selection by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I or by going to Select > Inverse. Now you have a rough selection of the corners and the edges of the photo. Having done this, add a Levels adjustment layer and move the middle slider to the right until you get a vignette that looks good to you. The value of the middle slider should be moved from its original value of 1.00 to 0.50 or even less, depending on the photo.
Having created the vignette, we move on to take care of the over-saturated colors. Before we add a Curves adjustment layer, we need to Flatten the image by pressing Ctrl+Shift+E. In the Curves adjustment layer options, we need to create a contrast curve resembling the letter S. Something like this:
The image now looks ridiculously over-saturated. Then, we need to create a new layer on top of the other two layers by going to Layer > New > Layer. Paint the layer black using the paint bucket tool.
Next, change the blending mode of the black layer to Hue and set the opacity to 40.
Before proceeding, flatten the image again (Ctrl+Shift+E). The LOMO photos are very sharp, too, so we need to sharpen the flattened image. There are numerous ways for doing this, but I’ll explain here the one that I think looks best with LOMOized pictures. Go to Image > Mode > Lab Color. Bring up the channels tab, which is positioned next to the Layers tab on that same palette. Select the Lightness channel and you’ll see that all the other channels are automatically deselected. Having selected the proper channel, go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and a dialog box should come up. Again, these photos need extra sharpness, so set the values to Amount: 50%, Radius: 50% and the Threshold: 0. Then go to Image > Mode > RGB color in order to switch the deselected channels back on.
There you have it! Save your photo as JPG and admire it.
A tutorial by Bonifacio Cruz
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