Written By Steve Patterson

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to look at how to do a bit of reverse photo restoration, turning a new or recent photo into an old photo, one that looks like it was taken many years ago, and we'll be doing it by combining several separate effects to create our final result. We'll be looking at how to replace a photo's original colors with a classic sepia tone, how to add a soft glow to an image, how to darken edges, how to add noise, dust and scratches, how to fade an image by brightening the blacks and darkening the whites, and we'll even see how to bring back some of the photo's original color when we're done. Lots of fun stuff!

Of course, as with many photo effects, the results you end up with will depend a lot on the photo you're using. If you have a picture of someone sitting in their new 2008 model car wearing the latest fashions while listening to an iPod, trying to make the photo look like it was taken 40 or 50 years ago isn't really going to work, unless your goal is to use the photo as proof that time machines really do exist.

Here's the image I'll be working with in this Photoshop tutorial:

And here's what it will look like when we're done:

Not what you're looking for? Check out our other Photo Effects tutorials!

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Of course, there's lots of different ways to age a photo in Photoshop. This, as they say, is one of them.

There's quite a few steps involved, so let's get started!

Step 1: Add A Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer

With our image newly opened in Photoshop, the first thing we're going to do is replace the photo's bright colors with a classic sepia tone, and we can do that easily using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:

Then choose Hue/Saturation from the list of adjustment layers that appears:

This brings up the Hue/Saturation dialog box. Click inside the checkbox to the left of the Colorize option in the bottom right of the dialog box, then drag the Hue slider to around 40 for a nice sepia tone:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box. If we look in our Layers palette now, we can see the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer that we've added above the Background layer (the layer which contains our original image):

And if we look at our image in the document window, we can see that the original color has been replaced with a sepia tone:

Step 2: Merge Both Layers Onto A New Layer

For our next step, we need to have of our existing layers merged on to a new layer above them. To do that, with the adjustment layer still selected in the Layers palette, hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key, then while holding the key down, go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen and select Merge Visible. You can also use the keyboard shortcut for this, which is Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E (Win) / Shift+Command+Option+E (Mac):

Normally when we select the Merge Visible option, Photoshop merges all the layers onto an existing layer in the Layers palette, which is usually not what we want to have happen since we lose the original layers in the process. By holding down the Alt/Option key while selecting Merge Visible (or adding it to the keyboard shortcut), we tell Photoshop to create a brand new layer for us and merge everything onto that new layer while keeping our original layers intact. If we look now in the Layers palette, we can see that sure enough, Photoshop has created a new layer above the previous two layers and has merged the other two layers onto it. We can see our sepia tone image in the new layer's preview thumbnail:

Step 3: Rename The New Layer "Glow"

We're going to use our merged layer to give our image a nice high contrast glow to it, and since we'll be adding a few more layers after that, let's keep track of what we're doing with each layer by giving them more informative names than simply "Layer 1", "Layer 2", and so on. Double-click directly on the name "Layer 1" in the Layers palette and rename it to "Glow":

Of course, you don't have to rename your layers if you feel you don't have that extra 5 seconds of your life to spare, but when you get into some serious Photoshop work where you could easily have hundreds of layers and they all have names like "Layer 10 copy 2" and "Layer 50 copy 7", you'll probably find yourself spending a lot more than 5 seconds trying to find the layer you're looking for.

We'll add our glow effect next!