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While it's possible to draw wrinkles and scratches directly in
Photoshop, sometimes the best results come
from using a photographed original. I’ll
turn this straightforward shot of an old ghost
town building, from the AbleStock.com stock photo collection, into a photograph that looks like
it’s been hanging around in a drawer for years.
Below is the texture I’ll use to
make this montage work. It’s
actually the inside cover of an old
paperback book, which has yellowed
naturally with age; some of the creases
come from natural wear and tear, and
some were applied manually before
photographing it with a digital camera.
The photograph of the building is
grouped with the texture layer, so
that it only shows up where the two
coincide. The mode of the building
layer is then set to Hard Light, which
allows a little of the texture to show
through—but which, more importantly,
brings that sepia color into play so
that the photograph now looks old and
somewhat washed-out.
Now to add some more texture.
The original texture layer is
duplicated, and brought to the front.
You’ll find that when you duplicate
the layer, the photograph will now be
grouped with the new layer; when you
drag it to the top of the layer stack,
the original photograph will lose its
grouping so you’ll need to group it with
the original texture layer once again.
Set the mode of this new texture layer
to Hard Light as well, so we can see
through it to the photograph beneath.
All we want from this second
texture layer is the folds and
wrinkles, and none of the color.
So begin by desaturating it using
Command (Control)-Shift-U, which
knocks all the color out of it. Now
we need to increase the contrast,
which can be done using any of the
Adjustment dialogs; but I find plain old
Brightness and Contrast is the easiest
way to proceed. Lower the brightness
and increase the contrast until you get
the effect you want. The original and
contrasted versions are shown across
the split here.
Now for the border. There’s an
easy way to make a uniform
border, even from such an irregularly
shaped outline. First, hold Command (Control)
and click on the texture layer’s name
in the Layers palette. This loads up its
area as a selection. Now contract that
selection by a suitable amount (say,
16 pixels) using the Modify section
of the Select menu. That gives us our
smaller inner. To make the border,
inverse the selection using Command (Control)-Shift-I and make a new layer; fill
this selection with white, set its layer
mode to Hard Light again and group it
with the original photograph,
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Steve Caplin is a freelance graphic artist specialising in satirical photo montage. He is the author of three books: How to Cheat in Photoshop; Icon Design and The Complete Guide to Digital Illustration and Max Pixel's
Adventures in Adobe Photoshop Elements 3. This article is an extract from How to Cheat in Photoshop, and is reproduced with permission. Copyright 2004, Focal Press.
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