It started with this photo.

[Portrait of Jimmy Crawford, New York, N.Y., between 1946 and 1948] (LOC)
I know I’ve mentioned several times that I’m working on a vintage film action for photoshop but I don’t think I ever shared why I’ve been so engrossed in it. I blame the Library of Congress! If you are not already a contact of the Library of Congress archives on flickr, I highly recommend you become one. Every Friday they release around 50 public domain photos from the archives. They are fascinating. But this one I just fell in love with — the color, the focus, just something about it really drew me in. So I set about trying to imitate it.

Now we all know that there are a thousand and one vintage recipes out there — mostly they involve upping the blue and magenta in the file. I’ve borrowed heavily from Veerle but altered her color curves and added a few tweaks to the highlights and mid-tones. So what does it look like? Well, you’ve seen some of them on my flickr stream. Here’s a couple of samples:
123/365: Red Haze

The First Born

83/365: Promises Unfulfilled

But I think you really need a before/after shot to get the full flavor:

Vintage-ified shot is on the left and standard processed is on the right. Cheryl has offered to help me test this out — anyone else interested? Right now I’ve only got it working in Photoshop — I use a command {select > color range} that isn’t available in Elements so until I find a work around for that, I’m afraid it’s a Photoshop only action. I know. I’m sorry! I’m also not entirely happy with how it handles skin tones. My teenage sons thought it made people look like sick vampires. Yikes!