In this special step-by-step tutorial Mark Galer shows you how to recreate a ‘toy camera’ look in Photoshop Lightroom.
Software: Lightroom 4.0
Rating: Intermediate
Most smartphones these days offer photographers the option to apply a 'toy camera' effect. With one touch you can darken edges, boost contrast, reduce sharpness and alter colours – creating an image that looks just like it was shot with a plastic film camera (think Holga or Lomo). It’s an interesting effect and it works well with certain images.
So, why bother publishing a tutorial like this when the effect is so easy to create on a mobile phone? The simple answer is control. If you apply the effect in a program like Lightroom, you get to control the strength of the effect, rather than having to rely on the ‘presets’ programmed into your phone. Want the vignette to be lighter, no problem. Like some more red in the image – just tweak the colour sliders. And best of all, a program like Lightroom is completely non-destructive, which means you can make as many changes as you like with no risk of damaging the original image file. So, no matter how much you ‘alter’ the image, you can always undo or modify the effect any time you like.
In this project we’ll show you how to create a preset that you can easily apply to a range of Raw images. The preset can also be applied to JPEG images, though since JPEG images have already been processed once (by the camera), you may find the effect causes excessive tonal banding. The resource image used in this project was captured with a Sony NEX-7 24 megapixel camera but has been resized and compressed to six megapixels, courtesy of the new lossy compression option in Photoshop Lightroom 4 and Adobe Camera Raw 7. Let the grunge begin!
Before (left) and after.
01 DOWNLOAD
You can follow along with this tutorial by first downloading the start image we've used in this project. You'll find the tutorial images for our image-editing projects at this page. Make sure you Control-click (or right-click) the link and choose the 'Download Linked File' or 'Download Linked File As...' option. (As the file is in Raw format you cannot simply click the link or the website will display a series of garbled characters.) Take note of where the image is saved on your desktop.
02 IMPORT
Open Lightroom and in the main menu go to File > Import Photos and Video. (Note: You need to be in the Library module to import images.) In the import workspace, locate the image you downloaded in the previous step (you can navigate around your hard drive with the menu items on the left-hand panel), make sure the image is ticked, and click the Import button. (If there are other images in the same location that you don’t want to import, first click the Uncheck All button then tick the box above the project image.)
03 LENS CORRECTIONS
Click Develop to access Lightroom’s editing controls. Before we get cracking on the luminance and colour adjustments let’s take care of a little bit of housekeeping. In the panel on the right of the screen scroll down until you get to the Lens Corrections tab. Tick the Enable Profile Corrections checkbox. This will correct the small amount of barrel distortion that’s been created by the 16mm f/2.8 wide-angle prime lens. I would prefer not to correct the vignetting (after all, vignetting is a key characteristic of toy camera photos) so I have moved the Vignetting slider all the way to the left to remove this correction.
04 REMOVE CHROMATIC ABERRATION
Still in the Lens Corrections tab click the Color tab and select the Remove Chromatic Aberration checkbox. This step will generally remove any colour fringing that can appear near edges in high-contrast areas.
05 COLOUR, CONTRAST AND CLARITY
Scroll up the panel on the right to the Basic section. Move the Temp slider right to a setting of around 7,400°K to warm things up a little. Move the Contrast and Shadows sliders to a value of +60 to add some drama to the image. To really make the image ‘pop’ we can inject the image with some ‘presence’ by raising the Clarity slider to +80, Vibrance to +50 and Saturation to +10.
06 TONE CURVE
In the following steps we’ll create a 'faded film' look. Scroll down to the Tone Curve panel and click the small icon in the lower right so we can edit the 'Point Curve'. In the Channel options directly below the curve select the Blue Channel. (The facility to edit individual Red, Green and Blue channels is new to Lightroom 4).
07 BLUE CHANNEL
Click on the point in the upper right-hand corner of the curve and drag it down until it is around 82%. Now move the point in the lower left-hand side of the curve and move it by approximately the same amount (from 0 to approximately 18%).
08 RED CHANNEL
Now change from the channel from Blue to Red and create a small ‘S’-curve, i.e. click in the highlight region of the line (three quarters of the way to the top) and drag the point slightly higher. Click again in the shadow region of the curve (a quarter of the way from the bottom of the curve) and drag the point slightly lower. Feel free to experiment with different values to create interesting grading effect.
09 DEFOCUS
Now let’s defocus the image to simulate the look of a cheap plastic lens. Click on the Graduated Filter icon (below the histogram) or press the ‘M’ key on your keyboard. This step brings up a series of sliders at the top of the panel. Reset all the sliders to zero (to reset the sliders double-click the word 'Effect' in the upper left-hand side of the panel) and then drag the Sharpness slider to -100. Click and drag short gradients from the left and right sides of the image towards the centre of the picture.
10 DEFOCUS AND DARKEN
Now, reduce the Exposure slider to around -0.8. Click and drag short gradients from the top and bottom of the image towards the centre of the picture. This step will further defocus the image and darken the top and bottom edges.
11 SELECTIVE LIGHTENING
While the Graduated Filter has been successful in adding a vignette it has also darkened the shelter. To counter this, click on the Adjustment Brush icon (to the right of the Graduated Filter icon). Return the Sharpness slider to 0 and increase the Exposure slider to around +0.66 (two-thirds of a stop). In the Brush Settings part of the panel choose a Size of 11 and a Feather of 65. Tick the Auto Mask option and paint the shelter while trying to keep the crosshair (in the centre of the brush icon) away from the sky.
12 COLOUR PRIORITY
In the following steps we will create a stylised soft white border for the image. Go to the Effects panel and in the Style options choose Color Priority.
13 ADD A BORDER
Move the Amount slider in the Post Crop Vignetting section of the panel to +100 and the Midpoint and Roundness sliders to -100. (We’ve ended up with a faded yellow border, rather than a white border, as a result of the adjustment we made to the Blue channel in the Tone Curve in step 07.
14 ADD GRAIN
In the Grain section of the panel raise the three sliders to +50 to simulate the effects of film grain. This step also reduces the appearance of tonal banding.
15 COLOUR TEMPERATURE
To complete the stylised look it is usually necessary to return to the Basic panel in order to fine-tune the tone and or colour adjustments. I have decided to raise the Temperature slider a second time to a value of 8,000°K to really enhance the feeling of a faded summer photo taken in the 1970s.
16 CREATE PRESET
Now that our edits are complete, let’s create a preset so we can apply the effect to other images with one click. In the main menu go to Develop > New Preset. In the dialog box that opens give the preset a name, click the Check All button and then click Create. (Note: Don’t click the Auto Tone option for this project. Auto Tone can make Lightroom presets more predictable when applied to images with very different exposures but in this case it’s best avoided because of the generous changes made to the Contrast and Shadows sliders in the early stages of this project.)
17 FINISH
To apply a preset to an image, simply bring up the preset panel on the left of the image (click the triangle if the panel is hidden) and click the preset you want. It’s worth noting that the preset will ignore any Adjustment Brush or Crop settings in order to safeguard different images from inappropriate adjustments. Simply adjust these changes as required for the individual image.
Final image.
Article first published in Australian Photography + digital (January 2013).
More info: http://www.markgaler.com