How to make a photo look like an old photograph by adding textures

Last week I showed you how to make an ordinary photo look contemporary, this week my goal is to show you how to make it look like an old photo, printed on canvas.

I will start by showing you the original image:

As you probably see the image is flat and lacks detail. Keep in mind that most of the time the camera doesn't show the exact colors, especially if your camera isn't top notch. What I would suggest you do is shoot your images in RAW, because this way you would have much more information to work with.

Usually the first thing I do when start working on a image is to check on the Levels. This is how I corrected them for this image:

Here it is the image after the correction done:

Then, what I usually do is adjusting the Hue/Saturation, but this time I'll skip that, because I know I'm going to use texture, and color tone that does not require color correction.

Next step is adding texture. This one I downloaded from a great web site http://frenchkisstextures.com/ primarily for textures. I got it for free, all I had to do was to subscribe for their newsletters. I get a lot of valuable info from them:

I'll use this particular texture with Linear Burn Blending Option and opacity 61%.

I like its detail, but I'll change that yellowish color for this project. I'm going to do that by adding Gradient Map adjustment layer...

Click where's shown on the image above, and it will open this window. Choose a solid Gradient type that starts with dark color and ends with white, not transparent but white:

Then follow the two steps as shown, click on 1 until the color indicator 2 becomes active, then click on it and it will open a new window:

...you can choose any color you like. In this particular example I used (R:53, G:26, B:2):

Now, this is how the image looks like after adding the Gradient Map adjustment layer:

We are almost finished. The only thing that still needs to be done here is to add more light to the picture. Currently, it is a little dark for my taste, so I will fix that by adjusting the Curves like that:

...and voila...here is the final look of the image:

Thank you for visiting my Blog, and expressing interest in my tutorials. Please, leave your comments and suggestions bellow, I will appreciate it. See you next time! :)