Canon G7 X Mk II – 1/320, f/5.6, ISO 125, Eval Meter

Do you remember this truck from last year’s Project 365? The photo was taken on August 27, 2022. Even though it made it as one of the best photos of 2022, I’ve had this gnawing feeling that I could have done a lot better. You see, for the PotD on August 27, I tried to recreate an old-style tintype effect using only Lightroom. The problem is, I don’t think it really replicates a tintype.

For this PotW, I decided to try and improve this using my newfound Photoshop skills. Now admittedly, this would be considered a very light reflection of tintypes – I wanted to also retain some of the ‘artsiness’ of the original as Roxie calls it. This new photo has been heavily Photoshopped. I used 8 different layers with 3 being dominant; the original color photo, a vintage paper layer, and a black and white grunge layer. The challenge was in setting the blending modes for the paper and grunge. The other layers were simply adjusting levels, curves, hue and saturation, and adding a deep emerald photo filter – all of these were only applied to the original photo. I then added a black and white filter to all of the layers.

I brought this back into Lightroom where I made some other adjustments before settling on the final image. One thing to note is that I could adjust the blending options on the paper and grunge layers to truly make this look like it was taken in the 1870’s.

Below is the original PotD last year – Roxie said she like this one more because it’s more ‘artsy’. Also below is the original color image for reference.