Hello
everyone this is Chris from Spoon Graphics
back again with another tutorial. This time I’ve got a photography themed tutorial where
we’ll be using Photoshop to create a cool photo effect that mimics some of the authentic
effects photographers used to create back in the analogue days of photography, before
the days of digital processing. The two effects we’ll be combining are split
toning and the matte look, which are really trendy styles at the moment thanks to filters
such as Instagram, but you can also see these kind of effects all over fashion shots and
hipster style culinery food photos. In the olden days before you plugged your
camera into your computer and downloaded your images, you had to process your camera film
using various chemicals in a darkroom. Before Photographers could mess around with Photoshop
Blending Modes they would experiment with chemical toners to produce different colours,
which is where all the popular digital cross processing effects come from. Other effects also used to come from using
different films and paper. One effect we’ll be mimicking in this tutorial is the washed
out low contrast look from printing onto matte paper, but that’s enough of the history lesson
for now, let’s get started and I’ll talk through the effects as we go. Open up your chosen image in Adobe Photoshop.
The easiest way to produce this matte effect is by adjusting the Levels. Add a Levels Adjustment
Layer by selecting it from the icon at the bottom of the layer panel. This will allow
us to non-destructively edit the image, unlike the standard Image>Adjustment>Levels tool. Drag the shadows handle of the bottom slider
inwards to reduce the contrast of the image and weaken the blacks to give the photo a
cool washed out look. Then darken the shadows by dragging the normal shadows and midtone
handles inwards on the main histogram. With just this one step we’ve already created
a popular effect that is used on those trendy high fashion ads, but let’s make a few more
tweaks. Now, black and White photography was much
more common than colour photography, and it also creates much more moody photos. Add a
Black and White adjustment layer to take out all the colour while retaining the contrast
of the image. One of the most popular analog effect is split
toning, where the print is bleached with a sepia toner, which gives that classic vintage
brown look, followed by selenium, which affects the darker shadows to give the image a harsh
mix of bluey greys and orangey yellow tones. The result is a dejected mood which works
great with photographs of abandoned ruins or any scene you want to have a gloomy feeling. To create this effect, add a Curves Adjustment
Layer in your Photoshop document. Change the drop down menu to the Blue channel,
then we want to increase the blues in the shadows but decrease them in the highlights.
So grab the start and end points of the curves graph and move them upwards for the shadows
but downwards for the highlights. The highlights are looking a little bit too
greeny now, so switch to the Green channel and bring down the amount of green in the
highlights by adjusting that curves graph. The effect is almost there, but it looks a
little bit too purple, so switch to the Red channel and bring down the red in the shadows
to move the hue slightly further towards blue. Finally, no analog style photo effect would
be complete without a touch of film grain. Go to Layer>New>Layer and change the Mode
to Overlay, then check the Fill with 50% grey option. Go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise and configure
the settings to 10%, then check the Gaussian and Monochromatic. So just those few steps finishes off the washed
out matte split toning effect in Photoshop. If you enjoyed this tutorial I’d really appreciate
a thumbs up on YouTube to help spread the word. Otherwise you can see more by subscribing
either on YouTube or on my website at spoon.graphics for plenty more design tutorials for Photoshop
and Illustrator. If you make use of this tutorial yourself
I’d love to see your results on Twitter to @chrisspooner, otherwise thanks for watching
and I’ll catch you all later.