Project: Lay on that grunge vibe!
Hmmm ... where to start? Ok, let me pull out an old photo from my Philadelphia set. What? It's blurry? Oh frisco! Ok, let's go with it. I mean, let's grunge it up so that you hardly notice.
First, make the color pop a little and adjust white-balance. Of course you can do that in either Lightroom or PS. In this case, I just went straight to PS and used the eyedropper tool under color balance. That stinking eye-dropper is way too cool!
Next, let's layer on a texture to give it that dark and scratchy look. I had to go through a bunch of different textures from my inventory. This one is courtesy of Ghostbones, I think. I tend to get a lot of my textures from Flickr users who give them away rights-free. I try not to use any that come from folks who want to keep their rights to them because then, when I make a composite work, I have to remember all the derivative rights acknowledgements. What a PAIN!
When I'm trying out textures, I open the texture and then copy it on my project as a layer. Thank heaven for CTL-T! Then I experiment with the layer type to find the one most suited. I think I landed on 'multiply' for this one. I had to tone it down to about 60% or so. As I look at it now, I wonder if that had been too aggressive a blending mode? 'Overlay' might be better. I'll go try that again later.
This particular texture has a natural vignette to it so that helped focus the viewer on the sign and the headlights of the car. It also hid that fact that, at 6400 ISO, there was notable noise in the skyline.
The texture has a yellowish tint. I didn't bother to correct that since with grunge ... well ... anything goes really! That's what makes it fun.
Anyhow, voila, here's the result. Did I get that late-night, grunge-band kind of vibe with this? Is it too over-the-top? Grunge is like hot-sauce, you add it 'to-taste' ... and I like it HOT!
Peace,
Glen
Hmmm ... where to start? Ok, let me pull out an old photo from my Philadelphia set. What? It's blurry? Oh frisco! Ok, let's go with it. I mean, let's grunge it up so that you hardly notice.
First, make the color pop a little and adjust white-balance. Of course you can do that in either Lightroom or PS. In this case, I just went straight to PS and used the eyedropper tool under color balance. That stinking eye-dropper is way too cool!
Next, let's layer on a texture to give it that dark and scratchy look. I had to go through a bunch of different textures from my inventory. This one is courtesy of Ghostbones, I think. I tend to get a lot of my textures from Flickr users who give them away rights-free. I try not to use any that come from folks who want to keep their rights to them because then, when I make a composite work, I have to remember all the derivative rights acknowledgements. What a PAIN!
When I'm trying out textures, I open the texture and then copy it on my project as a layer. Thank heaven for CTL-T! Then I experiment with the layer type to find the one most suited. I think I landed on 'multiply' for this one. I had to tone it down to about 60% or so. As I look at it now, I wonder if that had been too aggressive a blending mode? 'Overlay' might be better. I'll go try that again later.
This particular texture has a natural vignette to it so that helped focus the viewer on the sign and the headlights of the car. It also hid that fact that, at 6400 ISO, there was notable noise in the skyline.
The texture has a yellowish tint. I didn't bother to correct that since with grunge ... well ... anything goes really! That's what makes it fun.
Anyhow, voila, here's the result. Did I get that late-night, grunge-band kind of vibe with this? Is it too over-the-top? Grunge is like hot-sauce, you add it 'to-taste' ... and I like it HOT!
Peace,
Glen
