by David Galvin

Created on: November 17, 2010   Last Updated: August 16, 2011

Adobe Photoshop is a powerful and fun tool, capable of making any number of changes to any image, limited only by your creativity and imagination. And naturally, it’s a great application for making images look sharper, cleaner, and better. But sometimes…maybe we don’t want to make an image look necessarily better. Sometimes, we may want an image to look old, weathered, worn, or grainy. Those imperfections themselves have their own aesthetic charms, after all. Nevertheless, Photoshop is ready to provide.

Before you do anything else, you should consider just how “old” you want your image to look, and just “how” it has aged. Is it old because it was shot with an old-fashion camera? Or is it because the photograph itself has withstood the ravages of time? This is important to know what look you really want. When you have something in mind, apply any of the following. Note that none of these are actual steps, just tricks you can use to give your photo an old and weathered look. You can use all or some of them, and generally in any order you like. Just keep in mind, it’s a good idea to work on a newly duplicated layer before employing any such alteration, just in case. So with that aside, here they are:

1). Old photographs often aren’t the most colorful, and some don’t even have any color at all. So it would be a good idea to desaturate the image. This will reduce the vibrancy of the colors, and if fully desaturated, gets rid of them entirely for a black-and-and-white look. Apply this effect by going to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation, and adjusting the Saturation slider as necessary. Don't touch the Hue slider, and leave the Lightness slider where it is for the time being. This should always be the first thing you do when aging a photo.

2). Pictures getting on in years aren't the sharpest out there, and can get blurry. To get this effect, go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. Adjust the slider as necessary. Mind you, it should not be a particularly large blur, just a slight one; a radius of around 0.5 should do the trick.

3). Old photographs can sometimes be kind of grainy. If you want one for yourself, go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise. Play around with the slider and assorted settings until you get something that looks right, there’s no right or wrong type of grain. Just don’t apply too heavy an amount.

4). If an old photograph has any color to, chances are likely

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