Old and grunge - by Adzla

Okay, last few blog I showed you on how to manipulate hue to your photo in order to change the mood and its appearance. I bet some of you might want to change your photo or images from fully colored to toned or monochrome picture/image that will look like old and aged also 'grunge'. Some might straight convert the picture/image into greyscale or shoot in black & white image direct from in-camera settings.



I'm gonna show you how to toned image and give 'grunge' like effect on your image. Assuming that you have installed Adobe Photoshop and have some basic tool knowledge. This will only take about 15 minutes to do.


We're gonna change this dull picture. So open up the file and study the composition, lighting and exposure through the histogram.


After knowing what to do, crop out to desired composition and make a duplicate layer it the original.


Create new empty layer and fill it with black solid color and goto filter-render-cloud.


Clouded layer. Don't worry. Its alway like that.


Now filter-blur-gaussion blur the cloud layer and set blending to Softlight with the opacity 26%


Create a gradient fill and set blending to Overlay.


We are going to toned the image with a solid color. Create solid fill and blend it to Color.


Create adjustment layer of Levels. Adjust levels so that details of the sky can be retained.


Switch to mask and brush as shown.


Duplicate layer below and apply unsharpmask. Filter-sharpen-unsharpmask. And change blending mode as shown.


On the current layer, use dodge and burn tool to balance exposure of the building as shown.


Now, this is the best part. Click on brush and use heavy scratch brush. Set it to maximum and with just a click of the brush, you now have a scratch look of the image. Your image will be landscape. Just rotate the layer 90 degree and adjust the blending to your liking.


Finish image

You can play with the layers of adjustments such as Gradient map, Solid, Levels and Curve. Just experiment with those layers and try different blending modes.






To get your heavy scratch brush for Photoshop, you can refer to this web site . Its a great photoshop tutorial plus with simple follow-thru examples.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy.

Credits & Reference:

The author for the web
www.fantasylabs.net