The Ohanaware Weblog
Tip: How to Fade a Photo
Funtastic Photos is one of the best ways to make your photo look like it was taken a couple of centuries or even millenniums ago… Some times it looks really great… but its missing something… It’s simple, the photos aren’t faded as you would get with real photos. Most of the time the fading can detract from making the photo look great and make it look bad. So we left it out, some of you have asked, so we’ll explain how you can add it in yourself 
My friend Kim at the West Gate of Hengchun (恆春鎮)
Using the 1830s Daguerreotype filter
The first step is make the photo look old, I took this photo of a friend at a historic place and then choose the “1830s Daguerreotype” 1-Click Style.
You can see immediately that the photo does indeed look older thanks the huge shift in colors.
We can make it feel and look even older, by using a simple trick. First you need to open the “Advanced Options”, you do so by clicking the “Advanced Options” button in the right hand side of the window. A huge list will now appear from the right. In this list, look for an item called “Levels”, click it once to bring its
The Levels Effect
options into view. You will see that it has two “Double” sliders. To make the photo lighter, click on the left most widget of the bottom slider and drag it half way through like the picture to the right indicates. Instantly you’ll see the photo fading, taking years, then centuries off in seconds, the further right you drag the slider the lighter the photo will get. Personally I prefer half way, but I’ll let you be the judge of what you like.
Faded Photo
Faded and Tweaked
So there you have it. What’ll I suggest to end this tip, is to experiment a bit more. For the right hand image I changed the color and order of the vignette effect. You can change the order of effects, by simply dragging them up and down. This simple action can create radically different results and I highly recommend trying. Don’t worry about losing the effect as you can always undo everything you do.