Antiquing Digital Images in Photoshop – Part 2

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Photoshop, Photography, Digital Cameras, How to buy a digital camera

By: Darren Rowse  

This is the second part of 2 tutorials on making images have an antique feel with Photoshop. Part 1 is here. It’s been submitted by Elise Hennen from 28 Studios. Read more about Elise below.
All right, so you’ve got your picture looking a little older. Now, we’re going to give it some dimension and some abuse. You can do this with any picture. We’ll go from this to this:

First up, we’re going to give the picture scratches. Pick a brush that looks a little rough. Take it down to a size of two or so and make sure your foreground color is white. Create a new layer, and then go nuts. Draw little scratches all over it. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as it looks good and at least a little natural to you. Once your layer is relatively full, pull its opacity way down until the scratches are as subtle as you prefer. I wanted mine to be barely noticeable.
Put all of your existing layers into a new folder and call it something like “picture.” Then make your canvas a little larger than it is now – we want a white border around the picture. You can either go to Image > Canvas Size and resize it manually or use the crop tool. To use the crop tool (c), select the whole canvas using the tool. Then, holding down alt, resize the crop area to the size you want and hit enter.

Create a new layer underneath everything else. Use the eyedropper tool (i) to pick a light color from your picture. Fill the layer with that color. Adjust using Hue/Saturation if you want it lighter, darker, more/less saturated, etc. Your document should look something like this:

Now we want to roughen the edges of the picture on the paper. Create a mask for the “picture” folder (the button at the bottom of the layers palette—a circle inside a square). Pick a brush that’s a little rough on the edges. You may have to play with settings to get one that’s satisfactory to you. These are the settings I chose for mine:

With your foreground color set to black and the layer mask selected, paint around the edges of your picture. Paint a little ways over it. This is why you needed to crop your picture a little bigger than you wanted it. If you hold down shift when you start to paint, it will paint in a straight line either horizontally or vertically.

You can skip this step if you don’t want a tear in your picture. Zoom in to where you want the tear to be, pick a brush, and (on a new layer) paint a tear in the picture. As you work, zoom out to full size to see how it looks.
Once it looks good to you, create another layer and select the marquee tool (m). Make a selection about the size of a piece of clear tape and fill it with white. Use free transform (ctrl+t) to position it where you want it to be. Zoom in to the tape and grab the eraser tool (e). Make sure it’s on a soft brush setting (a little blurry around the edges) and pretty small. Eat away at the end of the tape with the eraser. This will give it the zig-zag look of tape torn from a dispenser. Once your tape looks good, drop the opacity until it really looks like a piece of tape.


Resize your canvas again, this time giving it a lot more room. This is where it gets interesting. Make a note of the dimensions of your document. Create a new document (ctrl+n). Go to the channels palette. It’s usually found behind the layers palette. Click the red channel to single it out. Go to Filter > Render > Clouds. Click the green channel and render clouds there. That’s it for this document. Click RGB to see the work of art you’ve created. Save this document as map.psd somewhere where you can find it again soon.
Go back to your other document. Select the “paper” layer. Go to Filter > Distort > Displace. Change the settings to 5 for both horizontal and vertical. Hit OK. It should come up with a dialog box to find a file. Navigate to your map.psd and hit OK. Your paper layer should look nice and funky.
If you don’t like the look of it, go back to map.psd and render clouds again in the Red and Green channels. If it still looks funny, play with the numbers in the dialog box. The larger the number, the further it will move the edges of the “paper” layer.


You may have noticed that it doesn’t look quite right. The picture is square, while the paper is rumpled. To fix that, select the layer mask of the picture. Hit ctrl+f to repeat the last filter with the same settings. Or you can repeat the steps you did for the “paper” layer. If your picture has some straight edges showing under the mask, move it around or resize the mask a little to fix it up.

To make sure the tear and the tape don’t extend beyond the edge of the paper, we’re going to mask them. Hold down ctrl and click on the “paper” layer’s icon in the layers palette. This should select everything in the “paper” layer. With the tear layer selected, click the button for layer mask. Copy this mask to the tape layer (in CS2, hold alt as you drag the mask to the other layer. otherwise, ctrl+click the mask, select the other layer, and hit the mask button).

I wanted to add a layer of dirt and uneven splotchiness. Create a new layer and render clouds on it (Filter > Render > Clouds). Change the blending mode to Vivid Light. It should look pretty moody. Bring the opacity down to 60%, or wherever it looks good for you. I didn’t want it affecting the picture too much, so I added a layer mask. Using a large, soft brush, I painted the mask black where I didn’t want the “grime” to show through as much.

Add a drop shadow to the “paper” layer and you’re done.
Double-click the layer to bring up the Layer Styles dialog box. Click “Drop Shadow” and play with the settings until you get something you like.
If the shadow looks orangeish, ctrl+click the “paper” layer to load the selection. Invert the selection (ctrl+shift+i), and select the picture folder’s mask. Fill with black.

Well, that’s it. Thanks for sticking it out, and I hope you learned something new!
Give this process a go and then head over to the forums to our Antiquing thread to show us your results.
Elise Hennen lives in Ohio, but is originally from Florida where she attended her first Photoshop World conference (which she highly recommends). She writes about herself saying – ‘I do a little bit of everything in Photoshop, from photo manipulation and illustration to web design and just fooling around. My husband and I own a web development company, 28 Studios, though we haven’t updated the site in a while. The cobbler’s children have no shoes… Oh yeah, and I take lots of pictures, too. I’ll be on the forum boards if you have any questions or comments about the tutorial. Enjoy!’


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