Woo hoo! Can you believe we’ve made it to Day 31? Would you be interested in this series published as an ebook? If so, feel free to email me or leave it in the comments.

I like photographing old things. Sometimes I take something new and make it look older by the way I edit. As long as you’re not a journalist, your photos only have to reflect your version of reality, right?

Look closely at the before and after photo and see if you can tell what I did besides changing the coloring and contrast/texture. I’ll explain below.

Day 31 - Before

Day 31 - After

Do you see it? Although I like side angles, I really wish I’d stood a little more in front of the sign. So I moved. In the edits. Yes, you can actually changed your perspective/point-of-view in Lightroom.

Although the Lens Correction panel is used mostly to correct lens distortion from zoom lenses, it can also rotate your image vertically or horizontally, rotate or scale.

The Edits:

  1. Shift the Horizontal Perspective in Lightroom’s Lens Corrections panel
  2. Shift the Vertical Perspective in Lightroom’s Lens Corrections panel
  3. Crop.
  4. Add a medium vignette (darken edges).
  5. Apply the Vintage-Retro Warm preset from the OnOne Signature Collection Presets for Lightroom 4, a free download. (If you have Lightroom 2 or 3, check out these free presets from OnOne.) You can still use LR3 presets in LR4 if you use the instructions from Day 3, but you can’t use LR4 presets in LR2 or 3 (I guess you could, but I wouldn’t expect good results).
  6. Increase contrast.
  7. Increase clarity.

Day 31 - Before Part 2

Here’s a second shot from the middle of the process. The horizontal and vertical perspective shifts created blank areas on the right. I had to crop to eliminate those areas, but I was careful to keep the red door on the left, which is awesome—right?

31 Days of Before & After Shots | click here.
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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

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