Tutorial: Vintage Grunge Effect

This is the first of hopefully many tutorials to come. This recipe of Lightroom adjustments is a cool way of making a photograph look a little more darker and edgy. I shot this photo recently and while it looks cool I think it can look a little cooler.

Programs used: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 and Adobe Photoshop CS3

The first step of editing any photograph is to crop it accordingly. Using the crop tool in Lightroom I've isolated the car slightly to the left in this horizontal fashion.

This series of tweaks are what it's all about. Crank up the Recovery, Fill, Blacks, Brightness, Contrast, and Vibrance all the way up and adjust slightly if necessary. To combat the crazy colors you'll end up seeing, turn the saturation almost all the way down. This will give it the faded, vintage look.

Next, I've adjusted the color temperature slightly to color correct the ground since it was looking rather blue.

Bring up the color sliders and make adjustments as necessary. In this instance I brought up the saturation in the greens to make the plants pop a little more since they got lost with the previous adjustments.

Now, to make the sky pop. Open the photo in Photoshop and create a new layer. Make sure black is selected as your foreground color and open the gradient tool and pick the black to transparency option. On the new layer, hold SHIFT and drag downward from the top of the photo to the middle. Select Overlay as the blending option in the layers palette.

For a final touch I'll be adding glints to the highlighted areas of the car. The key is to not over do it. Create a new a layer and select the brush tool. Under the brush palette options choose Assorted brushes and use brush number 48 which looks like an X. Increase the brush size by using the bracket keys and click once on the area needed. In this case I chose one on the rear view mirror and a few on the chrome bumper. Reduce the opacity of this layer down to 45%.

Boom Bam. You're done.