Give Old Photos A Punchy Stylistic Feel – Photoshop Tutorial – with Video

I found a number of old photos and after scanning them in – they had a grainy finish and had lost the punch and impact they once had. So I devised this little process to give them their punch back! Hopefully its of use to yourself. You can follow along with the screenshots or just watch the video.

Duplication

Ok, you are going to begin by duplicating the layer containing your photo. You can do this by selecting the layer with the original photo and hitting COMMAND / (CTRL) + J or by right-clicking the layer and navigating to ‘Duplicate Layer’. Repeat this step twice. Following this, you need to re-name the layers for good organisation.

Apply ‘Diffuse Filter’

Now, with the first of the duplicated layers selected ‘diffused smoothness’ you are going to navigate to Filter –> Stylize –> Diffuse and yur going to select Anisotropic. Hit OK. This is a trick that I sometimes use instead of Photoshop’s Reduce Noise filter if the grain is too extensive.

Apply ‘High Pass’

Now, with the second of the duplicated layers selected ‘high pass’ you are going to navigate to Filter –> Other –> High Pass. As you move the slider from left to right you will notice the filter picks up or dops more or less lines respectively. You need t experiment and see what value picks up the most lines in your image. For this image I decided 6.4

Set Blending Modes To Soft Light

Now, to finish up and complete the effect – you are going to set both layers blending mode to Soft Light. If you wish for certain images it may look nice to decrease the opacity of the layers ever so slightly, experimenting with different looks. So there we are – you should have now a slightly sharer punchier photo!