Photoshop Tutorial:Enhance a Portrait Phone Photos With Vintage Effect

In this tutorial we will enhance a cell phone photo with a vintage effect. This picture originally belongs to tuktuk22. He ask me to pimp it a little bit to beautifies it. So here it is... Below is the before and after look of what we will be creating. Lets get started!

1. Open your  photo. You can use your own photo. By default your photo will be the Background layer. Turn the Background layer into a normal layer by double clicking on it in the Layers panel and call the layer Portrait

2. Brighten up the portrait layer using curve image adjustment. In this photo i use the eyedropper icon to set the white point and black point of the photo. You can adjust it to suit your needs. Remember, different images different settings.

3. Go to Filter> Render> Lighting effect. Choose Omni for Light Type. Adjust the Intensity.

 4. Duplicate the portrait layer. Change the blending mode to Hard Light.

5. Add a Gradient Map. Click the gradient editor and choose the Blue, Yellow, Blue gradient preset. Lower the opacity to 40 %

6. Duplicate the Background layer and move it to the very top of the layers list. Change the blending mode to hard light then merge all layer together. To make the shiny glow i use topaz adjust plugin > potrait drama. Its easy an effortless. Now your image should look like this.

7. Use Smudge tool to soften the portrait. Adjust the strength between 8% - 20%.  Smudge it evenly according to the groove of the object. I also use smudge tool with greater strength to remove the hand at the bottom right of the portrait (marked with blue arrow). Use dodge and burn tool to add more detail to the face like the eyes, nose and lips (marked with red arrow). use your creativity on this.

 
8. Reduce the saturation

 9.Create a new layer and put it on top of the layer list. Name it blue background. Lower the opacity to 25% and change the blend mode to multiply. Paint the background image with blue color (I use #1a268b)

10. Now add more bokeh feel to the portrait with the bokeh texture image. Open up the texture image and drag it on top of the layer list and name the layer Bokeh Texture. Set the blend mode to Darken. Erase the unnecessary part so it would only fill the top left background of the portrait.

11.add a yellow photo filter to the image

12. And that's it. Here is our final image

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