Photo To Vintage Postcard

Overview: This tutorial gives some basic steps to transform a photo into the look of a vintage post card. This is just one way to achieve the effect. There no doubt are numerous ways to accomplish similar looks.

Here is the original photo.

Here is vintage postcard look.

Step 1: Starting with your photo loaded into TwistedBrush, first a Detail Blur filter is applied to reduce detail without giving too soft a look. Select menu Filter > Blur > Detail Blur

Notice the Threshold slider is moved all the way down to increase the amount of the blur. Press Apply and Continue to move to the next step. 

Step 2: Now the Emboss 2 filter is used to give some stylize accents. The default settings should work fine.

Once again press Apply and Continue since we have 1 more filter to apply.

Step 3: Next use the Hyper Saturation filter. Adjust the slider until the saturation level is to your liking.

Press Apply/Exit to exit the filter dialog. 

Step 4: Next gradients will be used to give a haze to the edges. First lets create a layer so that we can reduce the opacity of the gradients before applying them to are image. Click the Layers: box (below the color controls) to show the Layers Panel and create a layer above your image and set the opacity of the layer to 50%.

Step 5: Select the Gradient tool from the tool bar and choose the Radial and Alpha & Color 1 options.

Select a color to use for the edges. For this picture I choose a light pink color from the clouds. Right click near the center of your page and drag the cursor to a corner. 

Step 6: Merge the layer that has the gradient using the Merge button on the Layers panel.

Step 7: Create another layer again at layer slot 3 like what was done in Step 4. This time set the opacity to around 80%. Now change the Gradient tool to be Linear and Color 1 & Alpha.

Draw a number of gradients from the right edge of the image towards the center to haze out the right edge more. When complete merge the layer. 

Step 8: Almost done, just 2 more filters to apply. Select the menu Filters > Colors > Adjust Lab. This will be used to tint the image towards yellow.

Adjust the b slider towards the right, here I've used 57%. Press Apply and Continue when done. 

Step 9: The final filter is the Texturize Bump Surface. Once this filter is selected use the second list box and choose charcoal paper horizontal and reduce the Weight so the texture isn't too strong.

That's it, press Appy/Exit to exit the filter dialog. The transformation is complete.