In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to achieve the Quick  Antique Colouring effect, that you can find in my latest group of actions.

 

1.  If you have retouched the image and made density corrections, press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy of the image.

If you are working from the original image, press crtl-J. Name this layer Softlight.

 

2. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and apply with a radius between 5 px – 10px .

 

3. Change the blend mode of the Softlight layer to Softlight.

4. Open the Layer Style Palette and move the Blend If black sliders to 25, then hold alt to split them and move the other slider to 100.

5. Apply a Channel Mixer adjustment layer.

6. Move the Channel Mixer adjustment layer to underneath the Softlight layer.

Here’s the final image and two other variations on the same effect:

The first version is as described in the tutorial above. The second image has the dress masked out on the Channel Mixer adjustment layer. The third image has the skin masked out on the Channel Mixer layer, then a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer is clipped in to the softlight layer, with the saturation set at -100, with everything bar the skin masked out.

Here you can download the action on its own:

Quick Antique Colouring Action (3.8 KiB)

Added: December 21, 2009
Downloads: 49

Or you can download the whole set here: AllyKatDesign Actions