Photos

It's a funny old world, that in an age of crystal clear digital images we still want to make some of our pictures look as aged as possible.

If I'm aging a photograph, I take it through several stages, it's like restoration in reverse.

First is conversion to monochrome, I use the channel mixer to get a better balance of grey shades, the desaturate command is pretty limited in its scope.

Contrast is reduced, no sharp black and whites here, the image wants to look like its been sitting in a drawer for several decades, fading slowly over time.

Blurring, lenses didn't have the sharpness that modern ones have, so I'm pretty generous with blur, I use 'blur more' here, rather than gaussian, applying it two or three times.

Noise, old pictures are grainy, I don't use the add noise filter, instead I use texture/grain with the 'clumpy' setting.

I've also added a circular alpha mask to wash out the corners of the image, making them paler than the centre.

Finally hue/saturation to colourise the picture to the desired shade of sepia.