Modern cinematography is usually all about crisp images with high resolutions in millions of colors, but it wasn't always that way. In the early days of film, black and white was the best that you could get, and fuzzy hair-corruptable media was all that most impoverished film-makers could afford. In many ways we are much better off nowadays, but if you still hark back for times gone by, there is a very easy way to convert virtually any photograph into an image that looks like a frame from an old movie. Here's how...

Step 1:  Open up a stock image in Photoshop of any size and/or format. Virtually all images are suitable for this tutorial, but the best results usually involve large images with a generally high brightness. Desert photos offer excellent results. After all, westerns were very popular in the monochrome days!

Step 2: Emulate a black and white effect by discarding the color saturation information in your image. To do this, select Image > Adjustments > Desaturate from the main menu. Many people do not like the default 'desaturated' look, so play around with the Levels and Brightness/Contrast until you are happy with the results.

Step 3: Now to add some blur, depicting the poor quality of media during the time. To do this, just run Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a setting of 1px.

Step 4: We're getting there, but our image lacks old-fashioned film grain. Thankfully, Photoshop itself now comes to our rescue with a fantastic filter included as default with the program. So, to add grain, run Filter > Texture > Grain with the following settngs: Intensity: 5 Contrast: 1 Grain Type: Vertical And there we go! A quick and easy 'old film effect'! But don't stop there - there's several 'old film' brushes in the downloads section that you can use to further enhance your results! Have fun!

- Tutorial written by Globator
- Translation by Man1c M0g

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