Super easy cool Photoshop Retro photo effect

Anyone who regularly reads my blog probably already knows how I’m crazy about anything Retro or vintage looking. Since I don’t really shoot much landscape, I downloaded this photo by Jetfoto from dreamstime.com and honestly just started to play with it. I was going for some kind of cool retro effect, and something just came before me and voila! I got my self a super easy yet super cool effect, and I thought I’d share that with you… hope you like it!

BTW, you can all download the PSD file at the end of the post.

So as I’ve mentioned, I started out with this landscape. First thing you notice is how it’s faded. So I duplicated it, set the blending mode to Soft light and the opacity to around 50%

Next, I created a curves adjustment layer. I added a little bit of red, magenta, and blue to the darker areas of the image.

On a new layer, I selected the gradient tool with a violet to orange gradient (it’s already there in the default presets), and I just drew a diagonal line from the upper left corner to the lower right corner. I set the blending mode of this layer to soft light with 50% opacity.

Next, I added a vignette. I don’t do my vignettes like normal people do, because I like my corners to kind of blend in with the original colors around the corners instead of just having some dark black cast. So to do that, I picked the Laso tool. I drew a rough, uneven kind of oval circle along the edges of my photo. I then inverted my selection, and added a new curves layer. What this did is it masked out the unselected area of my photo, so that the vignette effect would only apply along the edges of the image. I then grabbed the RGB curve from the mid-point (the mid-tones) and slid it downwards to get a dark look to the unmasked areas of the photograph. I ALT + clicked the layer mask to enter the mask mode, went to filters » blur » Gaussian blur and dragged the radius slider all the way to 250, so the vignette effect is soft and subtle. And finally I set the blending mode of my vignette layer to soft light.

That’s it. Hope you enjoyed this post. Please do share you results with me if you do try this out. Also, if you follow other methods to give your photos a vintage retro look, please share your tips with us in the comments below. We’d love to try them out.