Photoshop: Creating a Stylised Lomo Effect In 5 Steps

This is a guide - I encourage you to experiment and tweak the effects to suit your own tastes. You'll learn more by doing that, than from any tutorial.

1. Less contrast (optional really - i think the final effect is better with less contrast but it's not necessary and can be turned off later)
2. Creating a vignette
3. Editing the colour with Curves - editing the channels individually for more vintage colours
4. Importing old paper texture - gives the image a warmer, more tactile feel. Get some old paper textures here: http://bashcorpo.deviantart.com/gallery/resources/
5. Creating Light Leaks - my favourite feature of lomographic photos, this technique can look very authentic with more tweaking and experimenting with colours and blend modes

I use Photoshop CS3 in the video, but it should be almost exactly the same since version 7 (with the exception of the Shadow/Highlight tool, but that's an optional step).

Music: Lomov - Obvist
free mp3 available here: http://www.last.fm/music/lomov/_/Obvist

Created with VirtualDub, CamStudio, Audacity and Photoshop CS3

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Photoshop
• Tutorial
• Lomo
• Lomographic
• Old
• Vintage
• Texture
• Photo
• Tip
• Light
• Leaks
• Lightleak
• Vignette
• Lomov
• Obvist
• cs3

[jamieboyrockon]

Props to a great tutorial. But, you know, there is a much simpler and much cheaper way of doing this.

It's called buying a Lomography Camera. Go out and get yourself a nice Holga, Diana, or a Lomo LC-A+. It's as simple as that.

Plus, photos taken with those cameras have a sort of effect that cannot be captured with a DSLR.

[dimage1985]

@jamieboyrockon I agree that you can get some great looking photos using the Holgas and similar (which is why I made this tutorial to imitate the effect), but it's hardly easier and certainly not cheaper.

A Holga is like $50, plus another $10-20 for 1 film and processing and to get one good shot you're likely going to need to take a few rolls of film.

With this method, you can use your current camera and pretty much any graphics program (Paint.net, Gimp are two free ones).

[HaylieGrace]

Great tutorial!

I was wondering if you could explain to me how to import the old paper texture to me in more detail.. I own photoshop cs5 and I can't figure out how to get it opened up like you did! I would really appreciate it.. thankyou so much! =)

[dimage1985]

@HaylieGrace I just had the paper texture opened in photoshop in a tiled window (rather than full screen), so I had moved it off to the side.

That was really just for the video, so I could easily move over and drag-drop it on to the main canvas.

You should be able to go to something like Window > Arrange > Tile and that will let you drag and drop images on to your canvas with the Move Tool. Hope that helps.

[HaylieGrace]

@dimage1985 thankyou, and thankyou for answering so quickly! yes it did help!

i just have one other question.. I figured out how to open the paper texture in a tiled window and I had quite a high quality photo.. but when I went to drag it onto the photo I'm editting, it came up really small, no where near fitting the actual photo size. How do I get this to work?

Thanks once again!

[dimage1985]

@HaylieGrace You will either need to find a higher resolution paper texture (not too hard to find) or shrink down your original photo. You could also use the Transform tool to resize the paper texture (CTRL + T), but if it's too small, it will look blurry and not very nice.

I'd recommend finding some good, high resolution paper textures on Deviantart, Flickr or somewhere like that.

[Hiheyhelloyo]

Dude you're awesome

[AHCloudy]

Omg, you're awesome. But, I can't catch up with your speed! HAHA! :D

[Nanitaff]

Excellent!!!!!!!!!!!

[KimZierPhotography]

Fantastic tutorial thanks

[emoxmasochist]

Thank you, it's awesome and very clear.

[441greenleaf]

God bless you for this tutorial..<3