Guided Edit: Old Fashioned Photo
You probably already know this about me… if I’m going to scrap lift a layout, I’m going to make it as close to a twin as possible, but putting my own touch on it. And this month’s Scrap Lift Challenge is going to be no different. The layout Alexis has chosen is this one by AmaneseFe.
I have a huge folder of photos of children I’ve selected from Pixabay, so choosing which ones to use wasn’t too big a problem. The first hurdle to cross is to recreate the creamy, not-quite-sepia look Amanese has given her photos. So I played around a bit… This is the first photo I chose to edit. Isn’t he just so handsome?
I could have used an Action, but then I couldn’t share a method with you for getting there without one, so I went to the Guided Edits and looked at the For Fun edits. The Old Fashioned Photo looked promising.
I tried all three of the Options, Newspaper, Urban and Vivid, and decided I liked Vivid best. This was the result of one click on the button. It’s a good black-and-white image, but it doesn’t have that creamy taupe effect.
So I clicked on the bar that says Add Hue/Saturation. And this happened. It’s TOO BROWN! But I can fix that! The dialog box shows the defaults the Edit uses. There’s room to make adjustments. (I could pretty much have chosen ANY colour, not just brown, by moving that top slider in either direction.) The labels are H = Hue, S = Saturation and L =Lightness. Let’s see where I end up.
All I did was drop the Saturation down from 25 to 7. Now there’s a lovely hint of brown, but not too much. I’ve gone as far as I can with the Guided Edit, so I went down to the bottom right of the workspace and clicked on Next. (I cropped too much out of the screenshot… so I added the content of that lower right corner onto this one.) Reminder: If you accidentally click on Cancel, you’ll be right back at Square One.
This interface opens, offering you choices. You can Save, Save As (for creating an edited copy, rather than Saving over top of your original), Continue Editing in Quick (a menu of simple automated edits) or Expert. We’re going to Continue Editing in Expert because I know what tweaks are needed. So I clicked that button, then Done, down at the bottom right.
You’ll see immediately that Elements has created an Edit layer in the Layers Panel above the original photo. I’ve turned the visibility of the original off, since I don’t intend to use that layer for anything. All the remaining adjustments will be on the topmost layer. I clicked Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Shadows/Highlights.
The default for this tool is to dramatically decrease the Shadows but leaving the Highlights and Contrast alone. Oy, that screenshot looks better at full size… Default settings are Lighten Shadows 35%, Darken Highlights 0% and Midtone Contrast 0%. I further Lightened Shadows to 39%, made no changes to Darken Highlights and brought up the Midtone Contrast to 12%. It’s coming along!
Next, I clicked Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Brightness/Contrast.
Oh, that’s better! Here, the defaults are Brightness 0 and Contrast 0. I pushed the Brightness to 20 and the Contrast to 5. That blows out the highlights a bit, as seen with Amanese‘s photos, while making his eyes brighter.
Last tweak, I promise! Again Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Levels. This is the only keyboard shortcut I have for you today, 😉 CTRL/CMD>L.
The defaults for this tool are Input Levels 0, 1.00 and 255. Output Levels are 0 and 255. I adjusted the Input top end to 241 and tweaked both ends of the Output, to 18 and 238. Now the image is soft, creamy, dreamy and very similar to those on the original layout.
Then I used all the same steps to edit the second photo. The lighting for the original is a bit different than Photo 1, so the results aren’t quite identical. That’s not a big deal, because I know I can get it there. Stay tuned for my Scrap Lift layout!
Over the weekend I went right over a cliff when I found a Downloads folder IN MY DOWNLOADS FOLDER! It was crammed full of zipped folders and photos. Overflowingly full! So I spent many hours going through it, finding all the GingerScraps folders, unzipping and organizing them. It was like Christmas! Sort of literally…. there were lots of Christmas kits in there. So now I have all these “new” kits to play with… and I’m looking forward to it! We’ll see how well I keep up with my downloads going forward. I know me, it’s going to be a challenge.
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