Digital photography is now a standard worldwide, which means that fewer and fewer people spend time creating those classic photo albums with paper photos, stickers, text scraps and other goodies. If you’re a fan of handicrafts and miss those nice hand-made albums, here’s your chance to go back to them, at least in a digital version. Follow the steps of this easy tutorial and you’ll learn how to create a vintage photo album in Photoshop.
1. First of all, we need the background for our album. After browsing the web for a while, I decided to use this old notebook I found on stock.xchng. You may want to use a different image though.
2. Open the photos you want to add to your album. Taking into account that we want to create a vintage photo album, we need to apply an old photo effect. In this case I’ll use the vintage photo effect created by Emanuele Feronato, but there are many other similar tutorials to create old photos on the Web. Also, make sure they’re photos that could be taken a few years ago – an iPhone for example won’t look that “vintage”.
3. Following the Feronato tutorial, set your foreground and background colors to red and green respectively, and duplicate the layer.
4. With the new layer selected, go to Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map and apply this effect with the colors you selected in the previous step.
5. Now change this layer’s blending mode to Color and reduce the opacity to around 50%. Then flatten the image (Layer > Flatten image).
6. Go to Filter > Noise > Add noise and add this effect with the following settings.
7. Your image is ready to go into the album. Simply repeat the steps with any other photo you want to add and stick all those images on top of the background we had in step 1.
8. Finally, download these vintage photo corners from PSHero and apply them to your album by copying and pasting them on a new layer.
9. Your old photo album is ready.