Categories: Tutorials

Creating a vintage look in Pixelmator

2 min read

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

I am going to start with this image of Venice and walk through one way to apply a vintage style to the photograph.

First head over to the effects browser (Command – 3 if it’s not already open). Choose the Hue effect under the Color Options section. Drag the saturation slider down about 10-15 percent. Next we will want to darken the shadows of the image and increase the contrast. To do this open up the Levels effect and move the black point on the left of the histogram over to the right just a little bit.

Now we want to give a color shift to the image. We will add a greenish tint to the image by going into the curves color adjustment section. In your effects browser double-click on the Curves effect and then select the Green level. Move the handle on the left of the curve up to about 12 percent.

After you set the green level then move over to the blur and also move the leftmost point up on the curve adjustment to around 12-15 percent. Then slide this point over to the right to create a straight line and move it to somewhere around 30 percent. These are just guidelines but always modify the color to fit your needs.

Now we will want to add some yellow colors to the image to give it that aged, warm tone. For this go to the Channels effect. Since we can only adjust the RGB colors (Red, Green, Blue), we will choose the Blue channel since this is the opposite of yellow. When we remove blue we are adding in yellow.

For this example I moved the red down to -19 percent, the blue down to 62 percent(from 100 percent), and changed the constant to 26 percent. That’s it and now we have a cool retro style effect to our image.