Project four: Affinity Photo
James Paterson evokes the visual charm of old film prints using our free textures pack for Affinity Photo
Modern cameras can produce images of staggering clarity and pixel-perfect detail, but these defect-free digital depictions of scenes can sometimes feel a little cold.
It’s no surprise, then, that many of us feel nostalgia for a time when photography was harder, and imperfections in photos were the norm. There’s a certain charm to old pictures that have been tainted by colour casts, light leaks, blurry edges and grainy details. What they lack in crispness, they make up for in fuzzy old-school feels.
This perhaps goes some way to explaining the continuing popular trend for adding analogue effects to digital photos. It lends them some of that retro charm, and lets you create photos that evoke a feeling of time and place.
In this project, we’ll look at how to add a range of vintage effects to our photos, using simple layer skills in Affinity Photo. To help you out we’ve supplied a set of 15 textures and light leak images. You can copy these onto any photo you like, experiment with layer blend modes, and retro-ify your photos in seconds.
We’ll begin here by using the Noise filter to add a film grain effect, as if our photo was taken on an old roll of high-ISO film. Next, we’ll skew and fade the colours with a simple Curves adjustment. From here we can add a light leak effect of the sort you might see in old cameras, where a sliver of light has snuck in and fogged the edges of the film roll. Finally, we’ll blend a texture to rough up the image.
1 Create grain
Open the image in Affinity Photo and go to the Photo Persona. Go to Layer > New Live Filter Layer > Noise > Add Noise. Zoom in close and use the slider to add a grainy effect. Close the box. (You can tweak it at any time by doubleclicking the Live Filter in the Layers panel).
2 Get the matte look
Click the Adjustment icon in the Layers panel and choose Curves (or press Cmd/Ctrl+M). Drag the bottom-left point up and the top right point down, for a matte effect. We can reduce contrast further by adding two points to plot an inverted S-shape, as shown.
3 Skew the colours
Click Master and change it to Blue. Drag the bottom-left
