Use Picasa to create vintage color style photos
As far as I can tell, this is the only tutorial that shows you how to create a vintage photo effect in Picasa. I hope you like it... Let's say you've been on a lovely day out and taken a few photos on your digital camera, but when you get them home you realize they are all a bit boring. There's nothing exactly wrong with them -- they are just flat and dull. If you upload these to Facebook nobody will think you are cool. If this happens to you as often as it happens to me, read on....
This tutorial will show you how to make photos taken on your digital camera or camera phone look like they were short using a point and shoot film camera. The effect might not fool an expert -- but it will make your snaps stand out from the crowd on Facebook, and give them a funky, retro, colorful feel.
By the way, Picasa is a free tool from Google that helps you import, organize, and look after all your photos. It's extremely easy to use. You can download it for free from http://picasa.google.co.uk/.
It takes only 5 steps, each step only takes a few seconds. It will turn a boring run of the mill photo like this:
Into something like this:
Or this:
If you like the sound of that, read on...
Step 1 -- Basic Fixes
First things first, get the basic photo in good shape. Go to the Basic Fixes tab and do whatever needs to be done -- fix red eye, crop it. Click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button to get your color and balance sorted out. Your photo looks slightly better but still unremarkable.
Step 2 -- Tune the light
Next go to the Tuning tab. Increase the Shadows slider until just before it starts to look silly. This will make your photo more dramatic. Do the same for Highlights -- probably you won't be able to take that one so far. Finally, you guessed it, do the same for Fill Light.
Step 3 -- Saturation
Go to the Effects tab now and pick "Saturation". See if you can ramp it up a bit without the image starting to "break up" -- if you take the Saturation slider too far then strangely colored patches will start to appear. Just take it far enough to give you bright colors.
Step 4 -- Soft Focus
Old cheap cameras couldn't focus as well as even a camera phone digital. Use the Soft Focus effect to give your picture blurry edges. Click Soft Focus and adjust the Size slider so that it's as big as it will go -- you only want the corners and edges of the photo to be blurred. Adjust the Amount slider until you like how it looks.
Step 5 -- Add a lightly colored Tint
Click the Tint effect. Now, adjust the Color Preservation slider so that it is at the maximum -- you only want a subtle tint. Then click on Pick Color.
To get retro, vintage colors, slide the mouse around in between the red and green areas -- and mainly in the quite light area, at the bottom of the picker. (I'm talking about the rainbow rectangle, not the hexagons at the top.) Slide around until you find the color you like for the photo. Click when you've got the right color, then click Apply.
You should now have a retro looking version of your photo that you can proudly upload to Facebook.
