Thursday, August 24, 2006

LOMO-Like

Just a few recepies i picked up regarding the LOMO-like proecess ..

Originated from : Faking the Lomo effect
and here at kingyo senbei's Blog : Simplified by HUGO VT for the Flickr Technique group

1.File: Open: the picture you want

2.Image: Adjustments: Brightness/Contrast: increase contrast by 20

3.Image: Adjustments: Hue/Saturation: increase saturation by 20

4.Choose the Rectangular Marquee Tool (your basic selection tool)

5.Change feather amount to 1/12 the width of your picture (if your picture is 600px wide then you will set your feather to 50px)

6.Select your entire picture note: using select: all, will not work

7.Select: Inverse

8.Layer: New: Layer

9.Change your primary color to black. Fill the selection (on the new, blank layer).

10.Change the blend mode of this layer to Overlay

11.Layer: Duplicate Layer

12.Now select your base layer (the one with the picture on it).

13.Layer: New: Layer

14.Change your fill tool to Gradient

15.Change your Gradient Type to Spherical

16.Change your Gradient Shading Style to "foreground to transparent" (I believe this is the default).

17.Change your primary color to white.

18.With the fill tool selected, click in the middle of the picture, and drag the line out to the farthest edge of your picture (if it's a portrait, use top or bottom, if landscape, use left or right).

19.Change the blend mode of this layer to Overlay

20.Change the Opacity of this layer to 80% (or whatever you see fit)

Personally I find that skipping the whole first layer bit (steps 4 to 10) the effect is very similar. Maybe someone can explain to me what difference it's supposed to make.

Enjoy!

And additons from
alephnaught at Flickr

I've noticed one thing about the "Fake Lomo" effect that's definately not quite right.

If you see these 3 genuine Lomo pics:

Two Towers (02 Jan 2005) Me vs Tower (01 Jan 2005) Pink Bicycle (01 Jan 2005)

... The tunneling effect is actually circular, and is cut off at the longer edges of the images.

Here's how I've done the tunneling effect in PS in the past:
1) Load up original image.
2) Copy background layer to new layer.
3) Fill background layer with black.
4) Add a layer mask to the picture layer, set to "Reveal all".
5) Go to gradient fill tool, and set it to spherical/radial fill, going from foreground to background colours.
6) Set primary/foreground colour to white, and secondary/background colour to very light grey (ie something like 75% white, or even more)
7) Go to mask, and fill with a radial fill out from the centre to the just beyond the corners of the picture. The result of this should be a filled mask which starts off as white in the center and slowly blends to very light grey at the corners.

The mask will slightly blend the picture layer with the background layer (Which is black), so it should look something like on this pic:

Snow over Toryglen (23 Feb 2003)

(NB The above was designed to look more like a Zenit EM pic than a Lomo LC-A, but the tunneling effect is quite similar.)

Further tweaks came from simpologist

A great tutorial and a great look, it's like putting pictures through the wash! I managed to liven up a photo of a mural at the end of my street by following the tutorial instructions, with a few variations:

Brixton mural: afterBrixton mural: after

The first trivial modification was to use Photoshop's adjustment layers to apply the usual brightness, contrast and saturation changes. This allows you more freedom to tweak the final effect.

Now, on a large image (8 megapixels) you hit a photoshop maximum feather of 250 px. I stuck with this, 250 feathering, but switched to an eliptical marquee selection, dragging the selection from top left to bottom right so the selection touches all 4 edges. This doesn't need to be 100% accurate, a few pixels out makes little difference at the end.

Also, after step 11, where the saturation vignette is duplicated, I switched back the duplicate layer (on top) to the normal blending mode, and whacked down the opacity to about 30%. This gives both increased saturation and a darkening of the vignette, which looks more authentic, to my eyes.

The last variation was to create a new layer after step 20 (the end); deselect the selection and and fill this new layer with green. Somewhere between lime and teal. When the layer is given overlay properties and the opacity dropped to 10-20%, it adds a characteristic green / yellow tinge that I see a lot in lomokev's images.

timsperez Posted an addition.

I recently come up with a visual tutorial on faking the lomo effect. You can download the pdf file on here.

timodesigns.com/Music/lomoLesson.pdf

Robert Matheson says: After playing around some more with this affect I think I've gotten it right but I believe there is some missing information in step 13... You need to deselect all and then create the new layer and apply the white gradiant. Otherwise, you don't get the strong highlights in the center of the photo. Below is my latest attempt after deselecting the outer feather area and then applying the gradiant.

I'm still not sure why my edges are so much darker than everyone elses... Cyberesque's image looks similar on the edges but fictures bull does not. Any suggestions?

Other resources :

Fallout75 Adds Lomo LC-A Simulator PSD file with a cross processing layer

::Swisswuff:: Takes it all to another level Here

The Digital Photography Schools tutorial on fake x-pro and LOMO-look

No comments: