20 Popular Photo Effects And How to Recreate Them In Photoshop

• February 25th, 2013
• Photoshop

For those passionate about photography and looking to elevate their skills, we recommend checking out this comprehensive blog post. The post provides detailed step-by-step instructions on how to recreate some of the most popular photography effects used by professional photographers with the use of Adobe Photoshop. Not only does it cover the popular effects such as HDR, lomo, light leaks, and vintage, but it also explains the techniques behind them in a way that is easy to understand.

By following the tutorials provided in this guide, you will not only learn how to recreate these photography effects but also gain a deeper understanding of the editing process. Additionally, this post is a valuable resource to bookmark for future reference, as it offers tips and tricks that will help you enhance your photos and elevate your photography skills to the next level. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced photographer, this post is sure to provide you with useful insights and techniques to improve your craft.

Photography effects tutorials:

1. Retro Photo Effect

Retro photo effects are all the rage! There’s plenty of apps to give your photos the vintage look in your iPhone, but what about your desktop images? Follow this super quick Photoshop tutorial to easily add a retro effect to your images in 3 simple steps, or just skip to the end and download the Action.

2. Lomo Effect

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past 10 years then you’re probably familiar with the look of Lomography or “Lomo” style photos. These photos typically feature unique coloring, high contrast, soft focus and dark vignettes. The movement was started in the early nineties when the founders were inspired by the images produced from cheap Russian toy cameras like the Lomo LC-A.

3. Vintage Photo Effect

This is a short but insightful tutorial. The post is a great video tutorial on how to create a vintage photo effect using Photoshop.

4. Movie Style Photo Effect

Everyone loves photo effects, especially those that are super easy to create and really transform your photos. Today we’re going to take a look at retouching a photo to create a cool cinematic movie effect with high contrast and blueish tones.

5. Instagram Photo Effect

We all know how much fun Instagram can be. Adding some really stunning effects to your smartphone images in the click of a button is great. But adding them in Photoshop can also be fast and simple, if you know the right moves. Lets take a quick look at how to accomplish an easy “Instagram Look” in just a few steps.

6. HDR Photo Effect

We all know how much fun Instagram can be. Adding some really stunning effects to your smartphone images in the click of a button is great. But adding them in Photoshop can also be fast and simple, if you know the right moves. Lets take a quick look at how to accomplish an easy “Instagram Look” in just a few steps.

7. Light Leaks Photo Effect

In this quick tip tutorial, we will explain how to create light leaks and lomo effects for you photos using actions in Photoshop.

8. Color Photo Effect

In this tutorial you will learn how to apply a color effect to a photo.

9. Desaturated Film Style Photo Effect

A great tutorial on how to create a great desaturated film style photo effect.

10. Comic Book Photo Effect

In this tutorial you will explore the process behind creating a comic book cover photo effect for a book titled Tour.

11. Dark Processed Lomo Photo Effect

Follow this step by step post processing guide to give your photos a dark lomo style effect with high contrast, blue tones and vignette burns. The effect is based on the popular lomographic technique and is similar to the processing effect used in many fashion shots and advertisement designs. Overall this effect does a great job of adding impact to a plain photography with cool colour casts and unusual saturation.

12. Halftone Photo Effect

The halftone effect is a popular effect you usually see in retro poster designs.  This trend seems to have died out,  nevertheless i thought it would be a great idea to show you how to recreate this type of photo effect. The tutorial is short, but insightful and takes no time to achieve the end out come.

13. Engraved Illustration  Photo Effect

A great tutorial to create a very unique photo effect.

14. Hipstamatic Photo Effect

If you are on Facebook or Twitter, chances are you’ve seen your friends post vintage, retro, worn, or decayed looking photos to their profile using apps like Instagram or Hipstamatic. Mobile apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic make it easy to produce these types of effects on your mobile device but unfortunately, it can be quite difficult and time-consuming to produce a similar effect using Photoshop alone. In this tutorial, author Mark Heaps will introduce you to Retrographer, a fantastic plugin for Photoshop that will allow you to apply similar effects to your photos in minutes with powerful fine-tuning control not possible in fixed preset applications.

15. Cinematic Photo Effect

There are a plethora of ways to treat a portrait, for a myriad of uses, but that is for another feature. Let’s tackle adding drama or a cinematic quality to a regular, humdrum portrait. Let’s even throw in a little bit of faking HDR. That way if you work on a project that requires a stunning shot without the stunning photography, you’ll be able to cobble something together using your mad skillz!

16. Tilt / Shift  Photo Effect

The blur effect helps to trick your eye into thinking your looking at something close up versus far away. So you naturally think the items in the photo are very small.

17. Retro Analog  Photo Effect

Back in the days of analog photography imperfections were part of the job. Colour washes, light leaks, vignettes and blurs were all common problems that appeared during the processing of your film, particularly from cheap cameras such as the Holga, or simply down to human error. While these problems don’t affect digital cameras, we can recreate the cool effects in Photoshop to give our shots that cool lo-fi retro effect.

18. Antique Photo Effect

Nothing tells a story like an old photo. You can find sometimes find them by the box fulls at antique shops and thrift stores. Not only are they fun to look at, there also fun and easy to create in Photoshop with a couple of adjustment layers and a good grunge texture.

19. Polaroid Photo Effect

Follow this step by step guide to giving your photos a cool vintage Polaroid style effect in Photoshop. We’ll adjust the colours of the image with adjustment layers then use Photoshop brushes to distress the photograph for an aged appearance.

20. Money Style Photo Effect

A nice technique to create a simple money style illustration using a regular photo, it’s not as perfect as the money illustrations we see in the dollar bill for example, but it’s a quick tip. There might be different ways so if you know another one share with us, this was the one I came up with and it’s very easy.