Quick Photography Tips

Here’s how to use Photoshop to make your photo look like a frame from a movie.

Here’s our starting image - a photo of a grocer but not just any grocer - this is the grocer that featured in the film Amelie. Anyway, on with the tutorial…

First crop the image to the dimensions of a cinema screen - 16 by 9. I’ve used the rectangular marquee tool with the below settings.

Duplicate the layer (Ctrl + J), set its blend mode to overlay and then reduce it’s opacity to give a subtle grungy effect.

Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and reduce the saturation until you’ve got a look you like.

Now add a new layer, fill it with black, set its opacity to 70% and use a very large soft edged brush and the eraser tool to remove the middle of the layer until you have a vignette effect as below.

Add a new layer, fill it with 50% gray (set RGB to 128, 128, 128), set its blend mode to overlay and then add film grain to this layer by going to Filter > Artistic > Film Grain. The options you choose here will depend on the size of your image. This gives you a non-destructive film grain layer.

Now we just need to add the letterbox black areas above and below. Multiply the width of your image by 0.75 and then go to Image > Canvas Size and set the height to that number and set Canvas Extension Color to Black which’ll give you something like this…