3 in 1 Grunge Effect in Photoshop
Here’s a nice tutorial that’ll create three grungy versions of your image in one go from which you can then choose your favourite. A great subject that’s asking for a grunge effect in post-processing is graffiti / street art. Here’s our starting image by chromatius…
Our first grunge effect is really simple. Duplicate the layer (Ctrl+J) and desaturate the top layer (Ctrl+Shift+U) and set the blend mode to Overlay. That gives us something like this…
Comparing that to the original we’ve significantly boosted the contrast and brought out the texture of the underlying wall. Looking good but I promised “3 in 1″ so let’s continue.
To get grunge effect number 2, turn off the visibility of the “Overlay” layer you’ve just created and duplicate the original layer again. Desaturate the duplicate as before but this time set the blend mode to “Multiply”. That’ll probably make everything a bit too dark so add a Levels adjustment layer and move the Input Levels white point slider to the left so it is under the right end of the part of the histogram that is greater than zero and then adjust the grey slider until the brightness is as you want it. That should give you our second grunge effect that looks like this…
Our third grunge look is now achieved by simply turning on the visibility of the “Overlay” layer from earlier…
Finally here are the original and the three different grunge looks side by side for comparison…
June 11th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
[...] far the process has been the same as the first part of our 3 in 1 grunge effect tip. Now though we’ll add a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer and set the Saturation to -100 and [...]