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How to Make Your Portrait Look Like an Old Photo

Digital photography has not only been a significant advancement in the way pictures are taken and processed inside a camera, it has also changed what we can do with pictures in postproduction editing. If you have a portrait of yourself that you want to change to make it look like an old photo, you can do this using any one of the many different photo editing programs available. Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Corel PaintShop and Paint.net are some of the programs available for purchase and for free.

Things You'll Need

Photo editing program

Instructions

- 1
  Open the program you want to use to edit your photo. Click ̶0;File̶1; and select ̶0;Open̶1; from the drop-down menu. Navigate to the folder containing the picture you want to edit. Highlight the file for the picture, click ̶0;OK̶1; and the picture will open.
- 2
  Click ̶0;Edit̶1; and ̶0;Color̶1; or ̶0;Adjust̶1; in the navigation bar of the program you are using. Select the ̶0;Color̶1; or ̶0;Hue̶1; adjustment and slide it toward the left until the color of the image becomes a muted brown color. This is known as ̶0;Sepia,̶1; which is tinting that was applied to portraits before there was color film to create a different appearance than black and white. Some programs have a ̶0;Sepia filter̶1; that can be applied. Using the slider allows you to control how much tinting you want.
- 3
  Click ̶0;File̶1; in the navigation bar and select ̶0;Save as̶1; from the menu. Give your edited picture a new file name and save it back to your computer̵7;s hard drive. Make sure you do not save it as the original file, because doing so will replace the original picture with edited picture.

Photography