Photoshop ~ Old Color Photo Effect

This tutorial will show you how to get an old faded print look to your color photos. Having attended Dave Cross seminars on more than one occasion, I share a mantra with Dave and that is to work in Photoshop with as little destruction to the final image as possible. We also want to maintain the ability to change our effect properties as each image may require different settings to achieve the look you want. For this reason I chose to tackle this effect by using adjustment layers.

If you are unfamiliar with adjustment layers in Photoshop, they are simply layers containing a fill (pattern, color, etc,) or an adjustment (Levels, Hue/Saturation, Curves, Color Balance, etc.). You can easily create an adjustment layer by clicking on the half-black half-white circle icon on bottom of the Layers palette and selecting a fill or adjustment from the drop down list. Adjustment layers can have their settings changed after they are applied simply by double-clicking on the adjustment layer. Adjustment layers also come with an attached mask allowing you to paint in or out as desired.

First, choose a color photo. The image I chose is one of my clients Abby & Dave – they were married on June 14th and were so much fun to work with, I’m truly sad it’s all over. They were very receptive with letting me experiment a bit while photographing with them so I thought I’d take the opportunity to play with a few of their photos.


Original color image from 5D & 24-70L processed through Lightroom 2 with a slight vignette added.

Start by adding a ‘Color Balance’ adjustment layer. You can click on the circle icon described above on the layers palette or go to the menu and choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance. In the dialogue box enter the following settings;
Shadows: +45, 0, -50
Midtones: 0, -20, -85
Highlights: 0, +15, -5
Make sure the Preserve Luminosity box is checked, then click OK.

Next add a ‘Hue/Saturation’ adjustment layer and enter the following settings;
Saturation -30
Make sure the Colorize box is NOT checked and click OK.

These settings will give you a good starting point; modify them to your taste. You can also set the blending modes on the Color Balance and Hue/Saturation layers to ‘color’ for a tone flattening effect, which is my preference.


Old Color Photo effect with blending modes set to ‘color’

I organize my adjustment layers into a group as shown in the following image. I created an action to make it a 1-click process and tweak what’s necessary with the adjustment layers.


Detail of the layer’s palette showing adjustment layers in a group.

Now you can take your Old Color Photo image and run it through additional effects. I chose to do some local dodging & burning as well as add some textures to complete the look of an old, faded and worn out color photo.


The final image.






Thanks for reading!