final analog version of the red tram
original image of the red tram

When your subject is old and historic, it may be desirable to give the entire image an aged, analog look. Using the color wheel, let's explore how to create an analogous color harmony and give and old-time look to this photo.

Exposure and Contrast

Before adjusting the color, let's use tone equalizer to brighten the shadows and darken the highlights, reducing the overall contrast:

tone equalizer module adjustments

Moreover, we want to place the emphasis on our subject, the red tram, so let's use an instance of diffuse or sharpen with the bloom preset and a drawn mask to soften the edges and details on the surrounding buildings:

diffuse or sharpen module bloom adjustments

Finally, we want to reuse this same mask and darken the areas around the tram using another instance of exposure. In particular, we want to reduce the contrast in the shadows to better mimic an old photograph; we can easily do this by pulling down the black level correction slider:

exposure module darken adjustments

Color

Below is the original color wheel for this image (left), which we want to transform to the analogous color palette (right):

final analog color wheel
original color wheel

What we want to do is compress the yellows, oranges, and reds to fit within the palette and then increase their saturation. At the same time, we want to reduce the saturation on any greens, blues, or purples. First, let's use an instance of colorize to push everything towards orange:

colorize module adjustments

This has the following effect:

colorize adjustments
image before colorize adjustments

Next, let's enhance the overall saturation and further reduce the contrast with color balance rgb; we'll also continue adding an orange tint to the whole image:

color balance rgb module adjustments

image after color balance rgb adjustments
image before color balance rgb adjustments

Finally, we will use the powerful color equalizer module to make a number of adjustments:

  • compress the hue of all blues and purples towards a single color
  • desaturate everything except the analogous colors we want to emphasize
  • increase the brightness on the reds to highlight the tram

You can see these adjustments below and the before/after affect they have:

color equalizer module adjustments

image after color equalizer adjustments
image before color equalizer adjustments

The cumulative result of all of these changes is a dramatically different image from the one we started with that gives an analog look and emphasizes the main subject.


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