Creating a film photo look and adding a frame

I have the google nik collection installed on my photoshop and it has a range of filters specifically designed to make your image look like it was taken with a film camera and different types of film camera at that.

I put some of the filters over an image just to see what the characteristics of the filters were and how they changed the image to give me ideas on how to edit my images to look like film.

These are a few filters I added over my image:

This filter appears to have increased the contrast a lot, increased shadows making the background darker and highlights appear more prominent making the whites and blacks contrast loads. There also appears to be a slight black faded vignette.

This filter is very different, the first noticeable thing was the thick white vignette that fades near the middle, the white tones in the images appear to have been increased and the image looks of a low contrast with maybe a slight increase in shadows.

This filter has added a white fram around the image to make it look like it is mounted on something. The image itself has a black jagged frame to make it look like an actual film print as they don't always have perfect straight edges. The white tones and highlights have been dramatically increased and the contrast/shadows have also been slightly increased.

Straight away I can see that this filter has a really soft tone as the highlights in the blurred area have been dramatically increased, emphasising the blur. The background shadows have been increased a lot making the area around the subject look almost completely black. This makes the subject stand out a lot more than in the original images and puts the focus on the facial expressions.

After experimenting with these different filters I decided to mess around with the basic editing to try and make the image look like film for myself:

For this image I used the dodge tool and the burn tool in different areas of the image to make the highlights lighter and the shadows darker but it gave a more soft look than just adjusting shadows/highlights in the basic edits.

I thought this gave a nice soft tone look and  also thought it made it look a lot more like it was taken on film so I was pleased with the first quick experiment.

I used the doge and burn tool on this image too but I went over the different sections a lot more. I thought this made the highlights stand out so much more and gave a better contrast. I used the burn tool on the shadows and left the subject as it was to avoid lightening or darkening the facial expressions captured so that they could still be seen easily rather than making them overexposed or too dark. It made for a nice contrast and the highlights around the image kind of formed a nice framing for the subject.

I made the levels darker for the one and made the image full contrast. I used the blending layer 'soft light' to blend the full contrast layer in.
I really like this one and think it has a good film like effect.




I typed in 'old film border for photoshop' and various combinations to find some frames to add to my images in photoshop:

I added them to my image and chose the blending mode screen for this one to blend it in to the image so it looked more like it was a real old image made with a film camera and developed:

With this fram I had to use the blending mode 'darken' as this fram was black compared to the white frame previous. It blended in to the image well.

I really like the effect that the frame gives and I think I will definitely use a frame on my final images to make them look like they were taken with film and developed as I really like the high contrast and sharpness you can get using film and it was fun to try and create the effect myself.