Faux Lomo Tutorial

There’s just something about an old film camera and its vignetting, grain, and color saturation that just brings a photo to life. One of the most popular film cameras to do so is the Lomo Kompakt Automat, or Lomo LC-A. The LC-A applies a certain quality and texture you just can’t get with digital images —without doing some Photoshop work. This little tutorial will show you my personal process for creating “faux Lomo” pictures, and here’s a before and after example of what we’ll do:




Part One: Color and Saturation Boost

Open the Master image file (provided here) in Photoshop, and you’ll see the following:



This image already has the basic levels set, etc., so what we want to do is work on boosting the contrast and saturation to mimic that of the LC-A. Let’s take care of the contrast first, so go to Image >Adjustments >Brightness/Contrast, and set the contrast to 20, like so:



You can see a dramatic difference already, but we’re not done — we want to make sure all the colors are nice and deep, so boost the saturation to 20 as well, by going to Image >Adjustments >Hue/Saturation like so:



This makes for a subtle change in this source image, but the greens and yellows pop much brighter — and the more color your other images have, the more of a pop you’ll see.

That’s it for Part One. Pretty simple, pretty basic — but the foundation for getting the saturated Lomo feel. As you experiment with other images, play around with the contrast and saturation settings, but 20 is pretty average for all types of images.

A note on contrast: look at everything in your image. Spiking the contrast can make some of the nuance and detail vanish, so be sure to look for things you want to stay in the image, and make sure the contrast spike doesn’t vanish them. Be particularly careful about eyes and shadows — if you’re worried about keeping them.

Remember, too, that you can also use Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight dialog (Image >Adjustments >Shadow/Highlight) to brighten-up dark areas — but do that before making the above contrast and saturation changes.

Now we move on to getting that wonderful Lomo vignetting…

Part Two: Vignetting

The wonderful little Minitar lens in the Lomo gives us some wonderful vignetting (darkening on the sides) on each frame. With Photoshop, it’s quite simple to get a consistent and believable vignette on your digital images with just a few mouse clicks.

1. The first thing you need to do is determine the width of you image (the master I’m using for this tutorial is 800x600). The vignetting seen with the LC-A takes up between 1/10th and 1/12th of the border area, so we need to vignette that amount of our image. I use 1/12th for my math, so take your width and divide by 12, and you get 800/12 = 66 — so that’s the magic number.

2. Select the marquee tool from Photoshop’s tool palette, make sure it’s set to the rectangle shape, and enter the magic number (66) into the Feather entry box. This will give us a nice, soft, fading vignette.

3. Now use the Marquee tool to select the entire image (I make Photoshop’s window slightly bigger than the image so that I can drag outside the image’s borders). NOTE: you CAN’T use Select All — it’s not the same thing! Use the Marquee and drag-select the entire image.

4. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see all four corners have been rounded off to the magic number. Now do Select >Inverse and your image should look like this (notice the “marching ant” marquee selection):



5. Now we need to add the vignette to our selection, but we don’t want to modify the background layer — so simply create a new layer via the Layers palette, or via Layer >New Layer.

6. We’ll use black for the fill color, so set the foreground color to black and fill-in the selection with option-Delete. Your image should now look something like this:

7. Obviously that vignetting is too dark, and what we really want is just a boost of the highlight and shadow. To accomplish this, simply set this layer’s Blending Mode to Overlay via the Layers palette.

When do that, you'll notice most of the shadow is gone, so to get it back just a little, simply duplicate that layer. Your Layers palette should now contain 2 vignette layers, both set to Overlay, and your original background layer. Your image should also look like this, at this point in the tutorial:



8. Now that we have the Lomo-like vignetting, we need to compensate for some of the wash and reflection the Minitar lens provides.

The first thing you need to do is select the background layer and then create a new layer (as described above). This gives you an empty layer between the background and the 2 vignette layers.

Now set the foreground color to white.

Select the gradient tool and set the gradient type to Radial (the second form the left in the toolbar), and set the Gradient picker to “Foreground to Transparent”. Now place your pointer somewhere near the center of the image, and drag the gradient to the far edge of the longest side.

You should end up with something like this:



To tone down the glow, set this layer’s Blending Mode to Overlay, and drop the opacity to around 50%. Depending upon your image, you may want to set the opacity higher or lower — the goal is to provide just a slight bit of wash out, but not so much all the color is drained.

And that leaves you with…



One suggestion I would make would be to make this workflow into a Photoshop Action. Just be aware that you HAVE to set the Feather amount to 1/10th or 1/12th of the image width, or the vignette will be off. I’ve created a few versions of this Action to accommodate the usual image widths I work with, so I can open up an image, pick the Action that matches my image size, and boom — near-instant Lomo shot.

Now take these steps, play around with them, find you own tweaks and ideas, and have fun! If you’d like a copy of this tutorial, you can download a PDF version here.