3.1. Project 3.1—Age an Image and Make a Photograph Pinup

We all have a pile of poor photographs, such as subjects that are cropped, people with red eye, blurry images, and more. These images might live in a shoe box or drawer or are buried in a folder on your hard drive, and you have no intention of letting them see the light of day. Do not delete or hide those images because they can be saved. In this project, you see how to push the color range of a photo to simulate vintage photography, change the composition, or emphasize a good aspect in the photo. Something nostalgic about old photographs makes a viewer overlook slight imperfections in a photo. In this project, you learn how you can use the color commands along with the tools you have been acquainted with in the previous chapter to mask a poor quality image and turn it into an aged photo pinup.

The Polaroid™ film that you reproduce in this project has a slightly desaturated, blue tint (see Figure 3-1). You can always use the Hue & Saturation command to attempt to reproduce this effect. However, the hue shift alters all the colors of an image, and it won't produce a believable color adjustment. For this effect, you want to use the Levels function. Levels stretch the brightness range and shift the midpoint of the value in an image or individual channels. In this instance, you adjust each of the three channels to produce the effect. (See the sidebar for an explanation of channels.)