the olden days…a photography lesson

Do you know what I lie awake at night thinking about sometimes?

I mean, besides the obvious question that forever plagues me: How on earth did I get the best blog readers on the whole, entire planet!?

I lie awake thinking about how nice it would be to live in the olden days. You know, back when life was simple. And easy. Before the complications of our modern day inserted themselves into mankind, life must have been so carefree. And green. And delightful.

I imagine that it would be great to be alive back then. When cows roamed free and children ran barefoot wearing little burlap knickers. How enjoyable and simple life must have been. Back when women ground their own flour from freshly harvested grain and when men wore leather hats and shaved with birch branches whittled into razors.

Or whatever men shaved their beards with back then.

Ahh, yes. And old fashioned MckMama. Wouldn’t it be great to live back then? I think so. When childbirth was all natural and women squatted in the fields and gave birth in between picking green beans from the rows in the garden. With no epidurals. And men were gone traveling to the next town and didn’t come back for weeks on end. And there were no cell phones by which to keep track of them. And you had to get up at the crack of dawn and go milk the cows. And hope they didn’t kick you. And when half your town came down with Consumption and…

Now wait a minute. Maybe living in the olden days wouldn’t really be so swell after all. Way to burst my own bubble. Man, I’m a real killjoy.

On second thought, maybe our modern day and age isn’t so bad after all. And if I’m nostalgic for the days of yore, maybe I can just antique my photographs and simply pretend I live way back when. Without actually having to draw water for my MSC up from a well using a leaky, wooden pail while wearing an apron made out of corn husks.

Or whatever women’s aprons were made of back then.

Yes, I think I’ll do that instead. Would you like to join me in learning how to antique your own photos? I’ll preface the rest of this post by acknowledging that I am a self-taught Photoshop student. The method I created to make my photos look aged is probably not the proper or most streamlined way to do it. Bona fide Photoshop educators in community colleges around the nation will probably roll over in their graves when they read my how-to steps here.

You know, if they are dead. Which they probably aren’t. If they are teaching community college classes and all.

But I digress. You’re welcome.

Now let’s get going. Before I start talking about what women back then used instead of tampons. You do not want me to go there. Trust me.

The ingredients you’ll need to antique your photos MckMama style are the following:

a digital photograph

Photoshop

access to iStockphoto images

If you don’t have these three things, just turn back now. Go darn some socks or knit a muffler or shuck some corn or use a railroad nail to give your oldest child a root canal. Or something. And come back to my blog later.

The rest of you, are you still with me?

Good.

To begin, open up the photo you want to antique in Photoshop.

Looks brand new, right? Like the photo just stepped out of the 21st century and right onto your hard drive. Bad. We want it to look like your photo is old. Really, really old.

Like this.

Yes, this is better. This is the authentic look we’re going for. I mean, besides the fact that way back in the olden days children didn’t actually wear shirts with their names silkscreened on them. But don’t go getting all technical on me, okay?

So, your photo is open in Photoshop.

What I personally like to do next is to play with the color saturation of the photograph and tone down the hues. A more muted look comes across as more old fashioned, right? Since they didn’t have RIT dye for their clothes back then. And stuff.

Go to enhance and drop down to adjust color and pull over to adjust hue/saturation.

Drag the middle saturation toggle to the left until your photograph is as muted as you’d like it.

Next, create a new layer over your photograph by clicking the new layer button the arrow in this image is pointing to.

Now, at this point you’re going to need to stop and make sure you have an image, like one from iStockphoto, handy. I buy lots of files from them. Ones that look like burlap or a huge old piece of scratched metal. I even have a sweet paint splatter one. Something abstract and distressed looking.

Got one? Good. Now let’s keep moving along.

Under file I want you to drop down to place.

Search your computer for your iStockphoto image and select it to be placed into your new layer.

Grab the edges of the image and drag them so that they cover your entire photograph.

Like this.

Next, while that layer is still selected, slide the opacity toggle over to the left a bit. See what happens? The iStockphoto image you placed becomes a little bit see through.

Play with the opacity until you have achieved the desired effect.

When you are pleased with how it looks, you can drop down to flatten image under layers. This will compress the layers and give you just one image again.

Now, if you really want to jazz things up, you can darken the edges of your photo a bit. There are a ton of different programs to use for this technique as well as many ways to do it even within Photoshop.

I’ll just show you one way. To keep it simple. Like in the olden days. Before people had shoes. And lipstick.

Using the oval selection tool, select an oval shaped part of your photograph.

Make sure that next to where it says feather that you’ve already entered a value of about 200 or thereabouts. Next, under select drop down to inverse.

The opposite of the oval you originally selected will now be highlighted. This is the area you’re going to want to darken a bit.

Under enhance, drop down to adjust lighting and drag your cursor over to levels.

I like to grab the center toggle and slide it to the right a bit, thus darkening the edges.

I also like to say the word toggle. But that’s a whole ‘nother post.

Voila! You are now ready to save your image, which looks delightfully distressed and antiqued. Just like in the olden days.

And you didn’t even need to churn your own butter or suffer through a long winter with only your log fireplace and woolen kerchief to keep you warm.