Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial
I'm going to show you how to create a faux Holga effect on an image in Photoshop.
Before we look at how we would create a faux Holga effect on an image let's
have a look and see what sort of effect we're looking for.
This is the image that I have used for my faux Holga effect and it's just
a pressure meter from a tram
that was shot in Hong Kong.
And the first thing that I've done to this image, the first main thing that I
did to the image was apply a gradient map filter to it to
lighten the lights and darken the darks. And then I applied a very strong vignette around
the edge of the image.
And to give it a sort of Holga look where you have light leaks in your
camera
I've actually created some light leaks. And I'm going to show you how to do that too.
So let's just tuck this image away and let's go and get the copy image and
we'll see how we'll create this faux Holga effect.
The first thing to do is to crop the image to square because it just
seems to work that much better.
So I've selected the Crop tool and I'm choosing a one-by-one square image. And I'm just
cropping
and placing the image where I want it to appear.
And I can make
a creative choice here.
I might take a little bit more of this handle this time and just click the
Checkmark icon.
And now I'm going to apply a gradient map to the image so I'm going to make
sure that black and white are my
background and foreground color. And I'll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Gradient Map
and click Ok. And then I'm going to select a Black and White gradient,
this one here Foreground to Background or Black to White will be just fine and
click Ok.
The way gradient maps work is that you're mapping black onto the
darkest pixels and
white onto the lightest pixels. It just gives the
image a little bit more of a pop to it.
And because we don't want this to be a black and white image we're just going to blend
that in using Overlay blend mode so that we get this
really, really sort of grungy texture to the image.
And you can reduce the opacity if you like. I'm not going to do it too much
this time. I think we'll leave it at quite a high opacity.
Then we're going to create our vignette layer so I'm just going to click here to
create a brand new layer on the image.
And I'm going to grab the Rectangular Marquee tool and just drag a
square or
loose rectangle inside this image.
And because I want the vignette to be around the edges I'm going to
select and inverse this so that
what is selected now is this area around the edge of the image. And I'm going to fill it
with black.
You can do that any number of ways but one way is just to choose black
as the foreground color
and just dump the Paint Bucket in there.
And then we'll do Select, Deselect.
So this edge is now there and it's deselected. I'm going to blend it
with the Multiple blend mode
so that it darkens the edges in the image. And then we're going to blur it so
I'm going to Filter,
Blur,
Gaussian Blur.
And we're going to apply a pretty hefty sort of blur to that
because we want it
quite heavy around the edges of the image, and I'll just click Ok.
It's possible to then warp that layer so that you could choose Edit, Transform, Warp
and you could then drag it outwards so that
for example the darker edges were only in the corners of the image and not
actually so much on the edges of the image. But you can do whatever you like
with that
edge effect to get what it is that you want here.
I'm just going to pull it out a little bit.
But I want to get back pretty quickly now onto those light leaks so I'm just going to
click the Checkmark here.
So there's our vignette effect.
For our light leaks I want a duplicate of this background layer so I'm just going
to drag the background layer onto the New Layer icon to make a duplicate of
it.
And I want to make this blended with the Screen blend mode because that will make it
lighter so I'll click Screen.
Now I've lost all the really nice effect that I had but I'm not really worried
about that because I'm about to get it back again.
To do that I'm going to add a layer mask to this layer here and then we're going
to start playing with this layer. And what we want is just a little bit of light
in this layer, not a lot. So
to do that we're going to
set black as the foreground color and white as the background color. And then let's go
and get a gradient so I'm just going to click on this Gradient tool here.
And what we want is this Foreground to Transparent because foreground is black,
Black to Transparent gradient.
The reason why we want a Black to Transparent gradient and not a Black
to White gradient is that
we're going to fill it in a few times. So I'm going to make sure that the mask layer
is selected and I'm just going to drag on my gradient. I'm just going to make
that layer visible too.
And what happens when I drag on the gradient is I get this black area.
But if I come in from this direction as well you'll see that the gradient isn't
being replaced. It's being added to.
Now you won't get that same effect with a Black to White gradient. The Black to
White gradient will replace itself each time you use it so
I really want a Black to Transparent gradient. And what I'm looking for here is
to just
blow a little light leak into here,
something about like that.
And I can drag down the opacity of this layer if I want to so that I can make the
light leak more or less
apparent on the image.
And I can also drag it above if I wanted to so I might get a different effect
with it being above this gradient map layer.
But there's my faux Holga image. This is the image that we started with
and this is the faux Holga toy camera sort of look for this image.
I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked
the tutorial please click the Like button and subscribe to my YouTube
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And visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips,
tricks and tutorials for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom,
Illustrator and more.