Affinity Photo - Vintage Look Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends and welcome to another affinity photo tutorial and this time we will do some really cool stuff because we are looking into how to create that nice interesting vintage look and that it's so hot on the internet so you can do a lot of things not just the Instagram stuff but really get creative get arty create your own style with the pictures and before we get started I want to show you something that I created for you because I really love your support and your feedback and your comments so I want to give back more to the community so I went ahead and I created a patreon account where you can get all my content and the videos and even more stuff that I will provide and I thought if you want to support me so we can do more stuff together I did an early supporter kind of thing so it's limited to 100 people it's just one dollar a month and you get a lot of extra things like I will provides the original files with all of the layers so you can look into them what I did exactly and so you can learn more also what you get with this is that you get an access to this court account not this court account discord channel I'm sorry where we can talk with each other and there is even a feedback channel so you can post your pictures I can give your feedback we can talk about it there is even a voice channel so we can do kind of a hangout thing where we meet together maybe once a week I don't know we have to test it out I'm not sure yet and we can talk about things maybe make an online tutorial or something live and what else is there you can get early access to the videos I will provide some extra posts here you get the original source files and of course if you're a supporter you also get more of a say in what future topics might be so for the suggestion the selection of topics stuff like that if you want to support me you can do that of course all of the videos all of my links will still be free for you on you tube so there's absolutely no need to do this it's only if you want to support me okay let's get started with the windage look and one thing you might want to do before you get into all the vintage editing is just head over to Google and search for 70s photos or sixties photos or 80s photos any kind of time period where you think this is kind of the look that I want to achieve with my pictures and as you can see it really depends on that material the chemicals the exposure to humidity to temperature to light on how the picture to create it over the years and so some have more of these yellow hues I'm have more of this red hue others have more of a blue thing going on or a brownish thing so as all kinds of ways um how pictures degrade over time so here you see one with a bluish hue in the picture so there's a lot of different kind of styles there's not just one vintage look you can achieve you see and also you can see there is that the whites and the blacks are kind of washed out so that it's it didn't have the kind of range and to capture lights and to capture gradients in that time so the photo material wasn't as good for amateur photographers or just in general as this can do it could be a good inspiration also kind of an approximation to see how much you want to change or influence your picture and of course keep in mind it is your photo you can do whatever you want so it doesn't have to be a simulation of a vintage look it can go in a very artistic and crazy and over-the-top direction whatever you feel is interesting for your picture and I have a super useful advice for you it's a trick that professional photograph is professional photo editors often use and these are color textures and Grunch maps and I would really suggest that you make a folder you collects a lot of them so you can use them anytime who you want and what I'm talking about is this stuff like that and it looks like it wouldn't fit with a photo but it gives you really cool effects and abilities to influence the look of your picture also this it looks really crazy and artistic watercolor kind of thing but if you blur it a little bit if you layer if you do layer blend effect stuff like that I will show you in this video how it's done you can achieve really nice look stuff like this with with scratches by the way the next video I will do is just about crunch maps and how to use them and also how to use these blend ranges over here which is a bit more advanced so I'm not going to touch this in this video but the next one will be about that there is another very nice water color texture basically okay so let's get started and we will start with this picture which is okay it's not too interesting maybe but we will make it into a really nice picture and so the first thing that we want to do is we click on the layer with the photo and we go down here where it says adjustments and from adjustments what we do is select the color balance and there you can see it's paired into three pairs which is say cyan and red magenta and green yellow and blue so this is either more tsiyon or more red either more magenta or more green either more yellow or more blue and you can already see if I play around a little bit here it already gets this vintage kind of look that we have seen in the other pictures so of course like this for example is a very nice way to have something that looks vintage if we compare this with pictures here maybe this one which has a reddish yellow tint so you see reddish and yellow okay this gives us a hint on what we need to do so we go here Rhett and here bit on yellow and maybe this one a little bit more on a magenta part and we go into the direction it doesn't have to be perfect it's it's up to your taste it's up to the source material that we are working with now why do I use crunch maps why do you use color maps and the thing is I use it because this is applied uniformly over all of the pictures so it looks too perfect it looks too nice if we look at the pictures here maybe look at another picture like here for example you can see that the Dyke the hoxsey the colored that Gration how is it pronounced I'm sorry how the colored that great degrade it over time it is not the same on all of the picture and also maybe a part was more product protected from sunlight or humidity than another part and we will simulate this by just using a Grunch map so for example if we use this one which looks very crazy right now but what we gonna do is we go here to the blend modes and we set it to overlay and then we go here to opacity and reduce it to something that looks like maybe 50% for now is good something a look that we want to have and now you see but there is too much details there is this watercolor edges not good we don't want to have that so we click here on effects we select this layer with the color map and go on effects and then we go on Gaussian blur and there we can play around to find something where we say okay this is a good look for us maybe this one and what you want to do and you can see if you go very blurry the actors go darker because here it's getting transparent so this is not good but we want to have is to preserve the original shape so you click here and preserve alpha and as you can see there the edges get light again so as it's good you see so there we have still the the color shapes and then we get blurry blurry blurry and it's gone you see and still but we have this nice color effect you see if I if I am height it again looks like this the other one looks like this is you can do some really cool stuff with it let's try the other one let's try this one again and of course please please don't be scared to experiment don't be scared to try out things I provide all the links for the original files in the description of the video so download the pictures open them and experiment and if it goes wrong don't worry just close the file and open again and start again and try around because only when you fail only if you experiment you can learn something new so this is a really good way and don't be scared and maybe not try it out with your very important pictures that you took maybe once in a lifetime kind of photos that you have don't don't experiment with them experiment with stuff that you downloaded from the internet wait it doesn't matter if the picture gets destroyed in the process or not so let's go back to this and let's see on difference mm layers our blending modes I'm sorry different layer blending modes what we can achieve so overlay is very good soft light is also a nice one but you can go very crazy you can do whatever you like because it's your picture it very much depends on what you want to achieve with the pictures or this one it's very blown out but maybe this is what you want to achieve so there's absolutely nothing wrong with using the picture like this or maybe let's reduce this a little bit you can go like this there's nothing wrong with it it looks vintage it looks a little bit crazy but it's really nice and let's maybe for now set it on soft light there we go maybe I will push this up a little bit because I want to show you something and this is if we zoom into the picture we have these nice things here like this one here up there and it looks like the picture is damaged like the protective layer over the chemicals of the picture has been damaged over time maybe by water maybe by humidity or any kind of other influence so this is really nice for us we even have another map we have this one with the scratches on top so we can also use this and with this you can even go and say I click on this layer and then I click down here on the mask layer so now the picture is still completely visible but what I can do is let's select the mask layer go on layer and invert and then we go to the brush tool over here paint brush tool set it to a fairly good size maybe a little bit bigger like this yes the hardness is on zero that's good for us opacity we can leave on 100% maybe for now let's set this to Y that you can see aha if I do this I can paint in here and add some stuff to the picture where I want to have it so it's not everything it's just some parts maybe up here a little bit maybe down here a little bit maybe go here and the etches there we go we can do some very cool stuff and let's go back to the move tool so we don't have to brush anymore and now we click back on the Grunch layer and we will set it to something that fits our interests like I said overlay is really nice for these kind of things soft light is good hard lights maybe a bit too extreme but let's try hard light and reduce the opacity so like this maybe it's not too bad okay and then activate the other layer again whoa this wasn't the right one where's the right one did we use this one yeah we use this one okay maybe hard life is not the right one to use here let's see experiments overlay let's go with overlay to use it a little bit and now you can see we have a little bit of scratches in the picture we have a little bit of stuff going on at the edges so it makes the picture more interesting and of course I mean you can experiment as much as you want with this and go crazy with it and try out different things let's go more here more here maybe a bit more here so you can see it gets really interesting you can be so creative just because of these kind of grunge maps and color things and abstract colors that you can apply to the picture okay I think we will leave it with this picture and go to the next one and experiment with that a bit more so I will delete the mask here or should I delete the mask no I will not delete the mask I will duplicate this one and then delete the mask because I want to give you the layers where you can look at this and what I did with the picture I will drag this down here and this time we will just use these two so I can leave the others alone yes okay I think that's good enough let's reset this layer really quickly so this should be normal again yes okay that's normal so now we have this picture a lot of people taking selfies so I thought this is a good idea to start out with this picture I don't know it started out but it included in the tutorial and again we do the same thing we click on the picture layer and we click down here in adjustments and we go for cell no sorry a color balance call a balance and then we try to figure out what is the look are we going for maybe we go to the other direction make it a little bit cooler let's see maybe like okay so this is more of in the other direction this is kind of bluish hue let's look here that was one with a bluish hue this one for example it's very kind of blue and a bit of pink maybe violet a little bit of violet so let's see uh-huh there we go more blue more blue that's not too bad huh what do you think let's compare okay one thing we can also do you can see here the contrast is reduced in the picture so let's click on our layer and oh by the way you can drag this into here so it just applied so it's just applied to this layer so this might be a good idea if you work with multiple pictures in one I could say in one composition okay um let's go to our curves there we go and so this is the darker parts of the picture this is the lighter parts so if you a drag this over here it's getting a really light if I drag this over here it's getting really dark but what we can do is if we drag this up here you can see and that the darker parts are going lighter and if I drag this down you can see oh sorry it was not the right one if you drag this down you can see that the lighter parts of getting darker so I have a reduced contrast in the picture let's drag this up a little bit more you can see you can be really precise with the things that you want to achieve in your vintage look you're not limited to anything or by anyone it's not like it's a premade Instagram filter you can achieve whatever you want to achieve with your picture so let's take this one again and see if we blend this again maybe try this time soft light and then go on to layer effect and blur it and we again want to preserve alpha like I said is very important maybe I leave in a little bit of this kind of destruction what's going on here it's a bit artsy but I kind of like it so why not leave it in here let's try the Grunch put this also to soft light or maybe overlay put it to overlay but it's if you use plant modes for layers it's important what kind of how can say how they are arranged so you can see if crunch is below the color layer it will just apply to the picture but if I pull it above it will apply to the color layer into the picture layer so this is important to know this and we can play with this a lot we can do really interesting things should we blur this maybe a little bit and maybe try here if we can find something this is kind of cool this is nice oh it's but it's too much in some edges my let's see the Arkin is kind of cool oh I'm an idiot I was on the wrong layer I'm sorry I'm sorry let's set this back to soft light and let's go to the grunge map and go up here color burn color burn is nice there we go this is pretty cool so as you can see just experiment you can go really crazy you can go you can go anywhere you want with your pictures and I think this is kind of interesting it's a bit you know it's not original vintage but it's not always needed it's not always the thing that you want to achieve sometimes you just want to have something and it it's more your own personal style so it's vintage style but at the same time it's artistic it's creative style so you find your own version your own way of expression of course we can still take it away and just have the original with a little bit of color grading so you can do whatever you like with your pictures one more thing I want to show you that I personally really like to do with pictures is click on the picture layer and then go down here to life filters life filters and you go to vignette filter the vignette means that the outset of the picture is getting darker and the middle is staying the same brightness in some programs you can even make the middle of the picture lighter I do it too much at the start so I can see where the circle is and as you can see there we have the circle in the middle you can even change the shape of the circle so make it because it's a white picture maybe maybe a little bit ellipse and then we push it out again to the borders of the picture maybe like this and then reduce the effect like make it more exposure again such as a light effect okay let's see this is before this is after it's a subtle change but what will happen is that it focuses the attention of the viewer more to the middle of the picture more to the main objective of the picture you're not getting as distracted by the other parts in the pictures as a very nice effect to focus the view on the main elements of picture so yeah I think this is it so we created one this is a bit more artsy and we created one this is a bit more realistic vintage style and so this is I guess I think more realistic to what original vintage pictures look and feel like and the other one is more of a vintage artistic kind of thing which is also very interesting and very nice so like I said be creative do your thing and find out what your own voice is for your creations okay thank you very much for watching leave comments and you can ask me questions in the comments the chest next topics give me feedback and if you want to support me I will link my patreon page in the description of the video thank you very much if you do there is no need to do but if you want to support me if you want to get access also to more content please do and see you around in the next episode which will be about crunch maps and how to use them and also how to use this blend ranges element up here this is giving you kind of a superpower of working with blend modes but it's a bit more advanced so I don't want to use it in this video okay thank you very much for watching and see you in the next episode bye