How to Make Old and “Damaged” Photos – A Vintage Effect

Load your image into Photoshop and apply Surface Blur (Filter > Blur > Surface Blur), Radius 5px, Threshold 15 px. Then go to Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map and choose a two-color gradient, a very dark, almost black shade of brown (#241d00) and white. Something like this:

Your image now has a brownish black and white look. Having done this, go to Image > Adjustments > Levels and set the middle slider to 0.80.

To adjust the contrast, go to Image > Adjustments > Curves and slide the upper end of the RGB curve to the left. See below:

Now, add the Photo Filter Adjustment to your image: Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter.

(the color of the Photo Filter is ffd800 and the density is 30% as shown above)

Around the center of your image, create a round selection using the elliptical marquee tool. While making the selection, hold down the Shift key, in order to make a perfect circle. Go to Select > Modify > Feather and enter the value of 80:

So, then you have to invert the selection Select > Inverse or Ctrl+Shift+ I and then apply the Lens Blur Filter and insert the values shown in the screenshot.

Now it’s time to add some noise. Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and enter the amount of 3%. Make sure that you checked the boxes for Gaussian and Monochromatic in the Add Noise dialog box. Then duplicate the Background layer and apply the Grain filter to it. Go to Filter > Texture > Grain and enter the values as below.

Then, change the opacity of the duplicate layer to around 50% or less, and change the Blending mode to Overlay.
For the scratched texture used in this tutorial, I went to the http://www.cgtextures.com website.

Load the scratched texture to Photoshop and copy/paste it to our project. On this particular texture, I just adjusted the levels a bit (go to Image > Adjustments > Levels and move the middle slider to the right) and rotated it to fit the orientation of our image.

Change the Blending mode of the texture to Soft Light and lower the opacity to 70-80%.

Merge all the layers and add Inner Glow layer style to the layer with the values indicated in the screenshot. NB: if your Background Layer is locked and non-editable, duplicate it and then delete it, leaving only the duplicate.

Add the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and desaturate the image to around -50 on the Saturation slider.
Then find a suitable Old paper texture on the internet. A simple Google Image Search should provide enough results to choose from.

Open it, copy/paste it over our project and rotate and transform it until it fits over our image. Then place it below the main photo layer.

Use the Lasso tool to make the selection and make the ragged edges on our old photo. Make your selection according to your needs and enter the Feather value of 1px. Invert the selection and cut out the edges by pressing Ctrl+X.

Now select the Old Paper Layer and use the Lasso tool on it to make another ragged edge. When you make your selection carefully, invert it and cut off what you do not need, again by pressing Ctrl+X.

Almost there! With the Old Paper Layer selected, go to Layer > Layer Style > Drop Shadow and enter the values below:

The following steps are completely optional. To make it even more vintage, you can add a layer below all other layers, serving as the background on which the image is placed. You can go with a different old paper texture or a doily, etc. I’ll go with another paper texture. Copy/paste the desired background and place it below all the other layers. Viola!

Furthermore, you can apply some old-style text on the image. Type the desired text, format the size and color, center it and apply the desired font. The font I’m using here is ITC Edwardian Script.

And here’s the final result of all our work!

A tutorial by Bonifacio Cruz