Add years to a photograph in mere moments
Adapted from "How to Cheat in Photoshop (Third Edition)" by Steve Caplin
While it's possible to draw wrinkles and scratches directly in Adobe® Photoshop® CS2, sometimes the best results come from using a photographed original. Here, we’ll turn this straightforward shot of an old ghost town building into a photograph that looks like it’s been hanging around in a drawer for years.
The ghost town image, before aging has been applied in Photoshop.
Step 1: Create a separate image with texture.
The following image is the texture we’ll use to make this montage work. It’s actually the inside cover of an old paperback book, which has yellowed naturally with age; some of the creases come from natural wear and tear, and some were applied manually before photographing it with a digital camera.
The inside cover of a book is a good starting point for our texture since it contains no text or pictures. Similarly, if you want to photograph a book to mock up a cover on it, take the existing cover (as long as it’s a hardback) and simply turn it around so that the white side faces outwards.
Step 2: Add texture and wash out the image.
The photograph of the building is grouped with the texture layer, so that it only shows up where the two coincide. The mode of the building layer is then set to Hard Light, which allows a little of the texture to show through – but which, more importantly, brings that sepia color into play so that the photograph now looks old and somewhat washed-out.
Hard Light mode creates the sepia effect.
Step 3: Add more texture.
The original texture layer is duplicated, and brought to the front. You’ll find that when you duplicate the layer, the photograph will now be grouped with the new layer; when you drag it to the top of the layer stack, the original photograph will lose its grouping so you’ll need to group it with the original texture layer once again. Set the mode of this new texture layer to Hard Light as well, so we can see through it to the photograph beneath.
Adding more texture to the image.
Step 4: Remove the color from the texture layer
All we want from this second texture layer is the folds and wrinkles, and none of the color. So begin by desaturating it using Ctrl + Shift + U (Windows) or Command + Shift + U (Mac OS), which knocks all the color out of it. Now we need to increase the contrast, which can be done using any of the Adjustment dialogs; but I find plain old Brightness and Contrast is the easiest way to proceed. Lower the brightness and increase the contrast until you get the effect you want.
The original and contrasted versions are shown across the split.
Step 5: Create the border.
There’s an easy way to make a uniform border, even from such an irregularly shaped outline. First, hold down Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac OS) and click on the texture layer’s name in the Layers palette. This loads up its area as a selection. Now contract that selection by a suitable amount (say, 16 pixels) using the Modify section of the Select menu. That gives us our smaller inner. To make the border, inverse the selection using Ctrl + Shift + I (Windows) or Command + Shift + I (Mac OS) and make a new layer; fill this selection with white, set its layer mode to Hard Light again and group it with the original photograph, beneath the second texture layer.
The final result with a realistic-looking border.
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