Dear mid-60s Buick caregivers who enjoy photos of their pride and joy,
A recent fad has been to "digitally age" photos to look as if they were taken many years ago. There are a number of programs and plug-ins that do this, but most don't provide decent control and fail to age photos to a particular time period. This is a shame because photo archives allow us to see what a photo from a given period should look like. For example, here is a photo taken of my trusty wagon all the way back in 1969:
You can see the photo isn't as sharp or crisp as a photo taken today, but it look far better than the typical "canned" digital aging program will generate.
It actually isn't that difficult to do your own digital aging. You'll need an image processing like the free program
GIMP. There are a host of programs that have similar features to Photoshop. I personally use the Mac shareware program called
GraphicConverter. Just about any program with some image manipulation filters will probably be potent enough to do what I've done. For the curious and those unafraid to try new things, here is how I went about it:
- Try reducing the contrast to create a slightly "hazy" effect. Modern cameras are much sharper than the home cameras of the 60s. To compensate, increase the brightness - especially on the faded slide. For black and white, leaving the image a little "dark" (apparently underexposed) "works" in the illusion.
- On the faded slide, reduce the color saturation. That's a quick way to make it appear faded and wash out the colors. I made almost random nudges in the color balance to make the colors appear a little "off."
- If you have access to the highlights and shadows, you can increase the shadows while reducing the highlights. This will restore of the authenticity that the earlier adjustments to the brightness and contrast caused to appear unrealistic.
- On both, I used the Sepia toning effect to shift colors (or greyscale) toward browns. It doesn't take much of this effect to create an illusion of an aged photo. On the slide nudge this only slightly. On an aged black and white photo, this needs to be set to a fairly high value, otherwise the photo looks too sharp.
- On a black and white photos you need to convert it from color to greyscale before the last step
- The images need to be blurred slightly to remove the digital sharpness. I used Gaussian blur because I've had good luck with it, but your blurring "mileage" will vary. In general, you want a bit more blur on a color slide because color images of the 1960s didn't preserve their dyes as well black and white images which by then was proven technology.
The one thing I realized very quickly is that very tiny adjustments could have big effects, so go slow in making your modifications. By all means work on copies and if you get to a result that you find better - save a copy of that just in case you screw it up by further meddling.
Here is some examples. Here it the original photo I took of my trusty wagon next a local church:
Here is the faded slide version of the same photo:
Here is the black and white photo equivalent:
In December I took this photo of my wagon next to a ranch building:
Here is the faded slide version of the same photo:
Here is the black and white photo equivalent:
It isn't as hard as it looks. The easiest way to achieve good effects is to have a a period photo to compare against. You can find all sorts of photos in photo archives accessible on the world wide web. I used techniques like this on my 2016 Christmas card. You could do the same for Christmas cards and other holiday announcements, make your own vintage post cards, and stuff like that.
Something you amuse yourself when you are cooped up in the house and can't do anything else!
Cheers, Edouard
P.S. If anyone want to get into the details, I recorded the settings I used in these aging examples.
