This postHere’s the before and after of the picture of the Mennonite girl I posted to Flickr yesterday:
And here’s how I did it:
1. Resize to 800×600.
2. Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Levels.
3. Move the sliders so that they enclose the black area. For this image I just had to move the black slider (on the left) to the right a little bit, and I also moved the center grey slider to the right to darken the image slightly.
4. Flatten the image.
5. Choose the Lasso tool.
6. Set the feather to 40 or 50 px.
7. Draw a circle inside the image, close to the edges but not too close.
8. Invert the selection (Select->Inverse).
9. Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Levels. Click Okay.
10. Move the center slider (the grey one) more to the right, until you get a nice vignette effect.
11. Flatten the image.
12. Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Curves. Click Okay.
13. Make a smooth S-shaped curve (you’ll need one point in the lower left and one in the upper right). Fiddle with this till you get the effect you want.
14. Flatten the image.
15. Use the Healing Brush to get rid of the date in the lower right corner. Could also use the Clone tool.
16. Use the Burn tool to get rid of the extra highlights. (Lots of other tools would work as well, of course.)
That’s it. It’s not too hard, really. (And it borrows heavily from the Lomo technique I blogged about yesterday.)
