how the photo was made: forgotten america series

July 10, 2008 – 1:30 am

I’d also be interested to hear how you got the effect in your Forgotten America photos… - Matthew Botos

This one’s for you, Matthew (and everyone else, of course). I’d like to talk about how the Forgotten America series was created by using this image as an example.

This is a scene in northwestern Ohio, right near the Indiana border, a timeless image photographed on the way to visit family. I like these kinds of timeless scenes and try to photograph what I can without cars or fashions that would date the image.

So what did I shoot it with? Why, my three megapixel Olympus point-n-shoot. Yes, that’s right, this photo started life as a tiny little color JPEG shot with a relatively primitive digital camera (the camera had no RAW option). It was in the glove box of my truck and it served the purpose.

This photo series really highlights, for me, the importance of keeping all of your images well cataloged. I pulled up a few years work all together in my catalog when putting the series together and a few images naturally went together. Some came from point-n-shoots, some from toy film cameras, some from my Nikon DSLR.

I wanted to create an antique look with the photos, a look that would also even out technical differences in the images. With this small JPEG I first enlarged the file to around 8″ x 10″ and set the dpi to 240, adequate for inkjet printing.

Then I used the old trick of adding a little noise to the image in Photoshop. Adding noise (which looks like film grain) and then adding sharpening can really increase the apparent sharpness of a small image like this. I like film grain, anyway, so this was a benefit in a couple of ways.

I also shoot and collect textures. The texture shown was from an aging metal door found in an alleyway here in Cincinnati. I cut and pasted the wear and stains on the door to create this overlay, which was set as a layer over top of the original image. The layer mode was set to “linear light” and with a little masking it produced the weathered effect.

The last step involved flattening the image, pasting it into a new file, converting the color mode to grayscale and applying a quadtone. That is how the warm tones were created. This coloring really creates the image and gives it (I feel) my personal “signature”.

Photoshop has a series of selectable duotones and tritones that can be applied to an image whose Color Mode has been converted from RGB to grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale). I then wanted to reintroduce color using the Duotone mode (Image>Mode>Duotone). This limits the colors in the photo to a specific color palette. None of the ready-made duotone/tritone/quadtone options did what I wanted, so I scanned some old photos (including tin types) and picked four individual colors from them, ranging from light to dark, and created my own four color quadtone that captured the essence I desired. That quadtone was then applied to the flattened image. This color palette is uniquely my own and, if you see the images in person, it really makes the difference.

I will mention that I then go back to my original working file with layers and revert to the point before it was flattened. The flattened, fully finished final is then added on top as another layer. This series of steps is saved as the working file.

For those of you with moderate Photoshop skills, this should be enough info to get you started well on your way to similar techniques. If you’re just developing your Photoshop skills using layers, layer masks and color modes, there are many great online sources for “how to’s”, like Kelby Training and the plethora of Photoshop books available from Amazon.com (many of them from the aforementioned Kelby Training authors). Phil over at Unsharpmasked is always adding to his Photoshop tutorials, also. And don’t be shy about asking for help in the prophotolife discussion forum.

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