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Making New Old Again

Started by Frinky, May 09, 2004, 12:53:41 AM

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Frinky

A continuation of this thread - well, my plea in it at any rate, and thanks to Rou and CCAB who helped.



I've got the font as close as need be, but my next challenge is the photography. The above photo is one taken from the 80's - it's been through a my scanner and a bit of Photoshop (light blurring when it was about 5 times larger than that to mix the "dot" seperation you get when scanning print), but you can still tell it's an "old" photo. I'm not sure what it is... textures? Contrast? Colour? (clothing?) I'll need to mix in new photos onto this site, but I need to make them look like they're from the 80's. I'm open to suggestions like printing and rescanning, but is there a set of procedures in Photoshop that can hep me accomplish this?



What is it about the way they look that suggests thier age?

Thanks,

Frinkus.

mr rou-rou

i meant to say, you could try this site http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

you have to upload a scan of the font and it trys to identify it, then you just go search it out if it's a chargeable one

glitch

Car adverts these days use a lot of "sheen" if you know what I mean. They use dynamic images (weird angles and perspective) with bold colours. People themselves rarely appear in car adverts - even if driving the windscreen tends to be artificially tinted. Also the cars have a very shiny surface, which in most adverts, use unrealistic light refraction to give the image more of an impact.

Darrell

A key is to make sure there are no pure or crushed blacks in it. The darkest colour should always be charcoal grey. Your example illustrates this perfectly.

Another tip is to enlarge the picture a fair bit, add some artificial grain, and then shrink it again - it gives it that authentic 'old photo scanned in look'. Involving a temporary rotation into this technique works even better. Only advice is if you're using a program which uses 'non destructive editing' - it's best if you copy into Paint and back into your standard program after each manipulation, as it ensures that all effects are locked in then.

Colours should be overcranked to crushing point, then reduced a tad to normal. You might want to make it a little more red and a little less blue too, to suggest a scan of a photo printed on poor quality paper.

If you want to make it look like it was actually scanned in the mid-nineties, do an antialias-based enlarge to 200%, sharpen it, copy it into Paint, and in that do a 50%/50% reduction - it will slightly damage the pixelation of detail and look like an authentic scan circa 1995.

That's all my advice anyway.

glitch

Eeek. I read this really the wrong way.

The best bet is probably to Google for old print adverts in the 80s and compare a few.


ccab

Quote from: "Darrell"Only advice is if you're using a program which uses 'non destructive editing' - it's best if you copy into Paint and back into your standard program after each manipulation, as it ensures that all effects are locked in then.

Colours should be overcranked to crushing point, then reduced a tad to normal.

Paint? What a bonkers piece of advice. So after every little adjustment you make in photoshop you should copy the image into Paint before copying it back to photoshop, making the next change and copying back to paint again? It must take you a sisyphean eternity to make anything. I have two questions for you. How exactly doesn't photoshop 'lock in' effects? & more importantly, which part of Broadmoor do they store you in, then?

The point about the 'crushed' blacks is spot on, although I tend to crush my colours with portable elephants and sumo jockeys. Another useful way of arriving at this effect is to gag & suffocate the colours with towels before weighing them down with bricks. Leave them for two hours and then lay into them with oaken batons (adobe actually make their own oaken batons which integrate perfectly with photoshop).

But seriously now. Those older photos tend to have flatter contrasts (work on the black in the levels output slider), faint colour casts (which you can add quickly with the rgb channels of curves dialogue or the selective colour dialogue working on neutrals), lurid, sickly-looking reds, greens and oranges - and also poorer focussing - you can gently blur it with a gaussian blur. The objects themselves are the best effects - the car - the clothes - those hairstyles. Don't fret too much about adding noise - it's easy when designing for the screen for the noise to lead to a clumsy, handmade look which I don't think you're after here.

mr rou-rou

Quote from: "mr rou-rou"i meant to say, you could try this site http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

you have to upload a scan of the font and it trys to identify it, then you just go search it out if it's a chargeable one

using your scan from the original thread, this reckons it's one of the following



http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/t26/minerva/modern/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/neufville/pragma-nd/light/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/neufville/pragma-nd/osf-light/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/ef/castle/ef-light/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/castle/light/

try it for yourself, it's interesting

ccab

Minerva looks like a close match, but the upper case R still isn't quite right. It's probably an exclusive typeface unavailable to our shabby masses. If you've got the patience you could rip it off quite easily with fontlab.

Darrell

Quote from: "ccab"Paint? What a bonkers piece of advice. So after every little adjustment you make in photoshop you should copy the image into Paint before copying it back to photoshop, making the next change and copying back to paint again? It must take you a sisyphean eternity to make anything. I have two questions for you. How exactly doesn't photoshop 'lock in' effects? & more importantly, which part of Broadmoor do they store you in, then?

I don't use Photoshop, and there are some programs which remember the original sizes and rotations of things, which isn't what you want for the effect I suggested. A very small amount of techniques benefit from this 'pasting in from Paint' trick, and I thought it was worth mentioning.

As for the grain, I didn't mean standard grain addition. I specifically meant to antialias-enlarge it to twice (or more) its original amount, rotate it a small amount, add some pretty light grain, make sure all the effects are locked in (hence the Paint trick), rotate it back to its original angle, and shrink it down again. It creates a nice, authentic-looking, subtle magazine print texture.

I just tend to invent my own tricks and techniques rather than relying on presets, that's all. No need to be so snotty and dismissive.

mook

Just out of interest CCAB, why do you prefer levels rather than curves when adjusting a pic?

Frinky, I'm not certain I understand what you are trying to achieve, if you can find some examples of what you want the finished article to look like it might help a bit..

ccab

Quote from: "mook"Just out of interest CCAB, why do you prefer levels rather than curves when adjusting a pic?

I don't recall expressing a preference for either, Mook. My working practices are top hush-hush.

Are you trying to let us know that you are the curves-master?

danielreal2k

Funny how cars that were your childhood dreams are now a pile of shit and you can pick up on auto trader for about £500   .  ie  Knighrider trans-am  , etc

fanny splendid

Guildford to Monaco in an Aston Martin DB9...

Will someone lend me £107,000?

(yes, I want the convertible)

glitch

Quote from: "ccab"
Quote from: "mook"Just out of interest CCAB, why do you prefer levels rather than curves when adjusting a pic?

I don't recall expressing a preference for either, Mook. My working practices are top hush-hush.

Are you trying to let us know that you are the curves-master?

I prefer to use levels, but to be honest, the three tools have their different uses:

Levels: spreads or compresses the overall tonal range. Affects the light but keeps the detail of the image. Affects the image globally, allowing for more believable lighting easier.
Brightness/contrast: obvious really, a quick way to boost the image but less control than levels and loses detail. Also global.
Curves:  allows you to increase/reduce individual tones. Very powerful tool, but care is needed to make it realistic (unless that's not the effect you're going for).

Hope that helps :)

Frinky

Wow, thankyou very much, all of you.

Xerode: Point taken and understood - the newer pics I'll be taking myself, so I should be able to duplicate that look simply by having poo equipment. Yay!

Darrell - nail on head there, thankyou - and it was staring me in the face the whole time. Your method of jumping in and out of paint is exactly the kind of thing I used to do before I discovered things like "merge visible" in Photoshop, etc, so don't worry, I know exactly where you were going with that. I'll be giving a go what you mentioned - I recall that I tried the same thing in the now defunct "snapshots of the past" MM thread (defunct becuase I posted it, and now it's gone).

Rou - thanks for the font linkage, those are looking quite good, not sure if I'll change what I'm on now since I've used it so heavilly already.

Quote from: "mr rou-rou"like this
http://www.jag-lovers.org/brochures/jagads.html

Yeah, exactly like that. Even the thumbnails scream "80s" - but I can't tell why. I think Xerode was onto it with the angles - is it the colours? Look how green the grass is...

...which was then answered by CCAB - great advice there, thanks. I should have some good source stuff to fiddle with tomorrow, I'll pop it on the board and let you all have your own go at it (I'm good like that, you see...). I can see what you're saying the more I scan stuff in.

Mook... I'm trying to get a new, "glossy" photo (beit digital or scanned) to look like an older, 70's/80s ones... to match that inherant look that 80's photos have. Cheers.

Anyway, thanks again, you're all stars.

Quote from: "danielreal2k"Funny how cars that were your childhood dreams are now a pile of shit and you can pick up on auto trader for about £500   .  ie  Knighrider trans-am  , etc

I fucking wish. 4 years ago you could get a nice, left-hander De Lo for about £13,000 which I found reasonable.. they're now pushing £17/18k and if you can find one of the 25 right-handers, I bet they'll be up to £30k by now. Not Aston money, but that's more than enough for me, thankyouverymuch.


Thankyou everyone for not making the really, really obvious joke.

ccab

Quote from: "xerode"Very powerful tool, but care is needed to make it realistic (unless that's not the effect you're going for).

Powerful perhaps - but tell me, can it antialias-enlarge images? CAN IT? can it lock in the effects like a vicious pixel screw - or a hard-up rgb landlord? Well?

I think not.

You can't even rotate an image for no particular purpose (before unrotating it, moving it across the screen & back again, switching the monitor off & back on again, before exporting it to notepad) - these facts alone mean that the curves dialogue is almost useless for any prospective antialias-enlarger.

Darrell

Ccab - since when did you become King Of The World? It's fair enough for someone to take the piss/have a go at me if I've acted like a prick, but you're just being nasty.

Besides, using convoluted methods and unusual/alternative ways of doing things is the only way things ever get done properly, and the only way anything remotely original gets created in any field of working. No need to be so snobbish just because you're fully skilled in the art of boring swirly montages with silhouettes of nude women and pretentious quotes slapped all over them.

Nearly Annually

...

Fuckit. Too early.

Anyway, I was just going to make the slightly obvious points that (i) it's the clothes and hair that do the most to date that first pic, so you could try adding subtle little props like a rubik cube balanced on the bumper, and (ii) ccab was coronated in May 1994, Darrell - you were probably watching the other side. Just wish him a happy jubilee and garotte him with bunting.