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Photo Retouching & Restoration For Dummies
Aging a Picture in Seconds
Adapted From: Photo Retouching & Restoration For Dummies

Some people like the discolored-with-age look. In fact, many digital cameras now offer a feature that automatically creates this effect after you shoot a picture. Talk about instant antiques!

To give your digital photo an overall tint, whatever the color, desaturate the photo, create a new layer to hold the paint, and paint the entire image the same color, adjusting the opacity and blending mode of the paint layer as needed.

Depending on your photo-editing program, you may have access to features that make the job a little easier than manually painting on a tint.

  • Some programs offer an automatic filter, usually called a Colorizer or Tint filter, that desaturates and tints your image in one step. In Photoshop Elements, this filter resides in the Hue/Saturation dialog box.
  • If you don't have access to an automatic tint feature and you have to use the hand-painted photo technique, look for a Fill command when you get to the part where you apply the tint color. The Fill command fills a selected area with a single color — usually the current foreground color. See your software's Help system to find out where this command lives. (In Elements, Fill lives on the Edit menu.)

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