Quick and Easy Photo Antiquing

I posted a link to this Japanese site once before, but that was almost two years ago. Since I was having fun playing with it this morning, I thought I'd post it again.

Giving your pictures a vintage look

You don't have to speak Japanese to figure out how to work this site.

1. Click on "choose file".

2. Pick a picture from your computer photo files that you would like to use and click on it, then click "choose"

3. Click on the blue bar under the file number.

4. Wait a few seconds and your picture will appear.

5. Drag and drop the picture onto your desktop.


This is what my pictures turned out like:

Sketch Trick

I can't draw a realistic person to save my life, but I wanted the story I'm writing for Blaze to look like it had hand-drawn illustrations. The solution for this is the photo-editing features on Photobucket. I am able to change my photographs so that they look like sketches, erase any background I don't want, print them out, and color them with colored pencils. It's like having custom coloring pages.

Before:




After:




Before:



The black and white sketch stage:



After coloring with pencils:

Playing with Photographs

I've been playing with photography this morning, because I just found a link to this Japanese website that makes your new photos look like old ones.

Photo Antiquing

This was also partly inspired by my purchase of a khaki colored pith helmet, that was delivered yesterday and sparked a fun session of DH and I playing dress-up and taking pictures of each other.

DH's picture turned out particularly well.





I wasn't happy with the lighting in the original color copy of this picture (taken in the apartment, but without flash), but it looks good as an antiqued picture.





I've also discovered that light colors work best with this process. Light colored clothes show details better and light colored backgrounds show off the subject better.

Everything was too dark in color in this picture and there was too much going on visually.



I was much happier with the results in this simple face shot.