Vintage Color

My apologies, I posted a link in a previous blog and didn’t have it linked anywhere.

This is a very simple trick, but not obvious if you’re new to Photoshop. The trick is understanding how Curves work and it’s not specific to Photoshop – you can use curves in Paintshop pro and GIMP for example. From what I understand the only exception is Photoshop Elements, which can’t do this trick because Elements doesn’t have a method to edit the channels (i.e. Red, Green and Blue channel alphas that make up the colors in the image).

Basically, it works because Photoshop has channels. In Photoshop, you can see the channels on the little tab next to the Layers pallet (by default, anyway). There you will see a color version of your image followed by three black and white versions. These black and white versions are actually red, green and blue versions of your images, when in RGB mode. You will see four black and white versions if in CMYK mode. cyan (sy-ann) ,magenta, yellow and black.
Maybe we’ll cover additive and subtractive color later.

As an example, look at the image below.

You can see the red spot is brightest in the red channel, the green is brightest in the green channel and so on.

Now, if we were to edit just the red channel, as in the video, by dragging the brightest level of red down, and the darkest level of it up, the red channel will lose the white and black areas. It will become mostly grey.

Because we’ve made the blackest areas of the red channel brighter, in the full colour version, the previously black background is a dark red.

And because we’re made the whitest areas of the red channel darker, in the full color version, the previously bright red is now duller shade.

That’s basically it, in a rather long-winded way. If you’re going to try this yourself, editing the red and blur channels works best for getting a vintage effect. Also remember to use the Curves function as an Adjustment Layer rather than just going to Image > Adjustments > Curves or CTRL+M as you will be able to edit it later on or fade the effect more easily or even mess around with blend-modes.

Tags: color, design, graphic design, Photo manipulation, photoshop