Gritty, Overprocessed Photo Effect
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Step 6: Add A New Layer Set To "Hard Light" And Filled With 50% Gray
At this point, we're done with the sharpness and contrast part of the effect. Let's add some noise. For that, we'll need a new layer. We also need to set the blend mode of the new layer to Hard Light and we need to fill the layer with the same solid gray color we saw when we were working with the High Pass filter. Fortunately, we can do all three things at once! Hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:
Holding down the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key tells Photoshop to pop up the New Layer dialog box for us before adding the layer. This gives us the chance to set some options first. At the top of the dialog box is a spot for us to name the new layer if we want to. This isn't absolutely necessary but since I'm getting a bit of a headache seeing layer names like "Layer 1 copy 2", I'm going to name this new layer "Noise". The really important options are down at the bottom of the dialog box. The Mode option allows us to set the blend mode for the new layer. Set the blend mode to Hard Light. As soon as you select Hard Light, you'll see a new option become available directly below it, called Fill with Hard-Light-neutral color (50% gray). This option will fill the new layer with gray. Click inside the checkbox to select it:
Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box, and we can see in the Layers palette that we now have a new layer named "Noise" (assuming you named your new layer). The layer's blend mode has been set to Hard Light for us, and we can see in the layer preview area to the left of the layer's name that it's been filled with 50% gray, which is the shade of gray halfway between black and white:
Step 7: Apply The "Noise" Filter
Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Noise, and then choose Add Noise:
This brings up the Add Noise dialog box. We're going to add some noise to give the effect more of a grainy look to it. First, set the Distribution option at the bottom of the dialog box to Gaussian, then check the Monochromatic option at the very bottom so that our noise appears as black and white dots instead of as little red, green and blue dots. The Amount option determines how much noise is added to the image. In our case, we just want to add a little noise, so I'm going to set my amount to around 4%. You may want to set your Amount value a little higher or lower depending on your image, but you definitely don't want to add too much noise, otherwise it will look like someone spilled salt and pepper all over your photo, which isn't exactly the effect we're going for:
Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box. Here's my image with the noise applied:
Step 8: Add A "Hue/Saturation" Adjustment Layer
We're almost done. All that's left to do is to desaturate the colors in the image. Click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and choose a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from the list that appears:
Step 9: Desaturate The Color
This brings up the Hue/Saturation dialog box. To give the color in the image more of a muted, washed-out appearance, simply click on the Saturation slider in the middle of the dialog box and drag it towards the left. The further you drag the slider, the more you remove the color from the image. Dragging the slider all the way to the left would completely remove the color, giving you a black and white photo. We don't want to take things quite that far, but I'm going to drag my Saturation slider towards the left until the input box is showing a value of around -40 or so:
Click OK to exit out of the dialog box, and we're done! Here, after desaturating the colors, is my final "overprocessed" result:
And there we have it!
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