I really love the way that old photo's look, I am talking about photo's from the 60s and 70s.  This is a look that is certainly lost with most modern digital photos that people are shooting.  I think it is the color's of these old photo's that I like so much, and the fact that each one has it's own character.  When you are surrounded by perfect looking photo's you start to appreciate retro photo's and the character they provide.

This absence of perfection is really a taste that I have developed while living in Philadelphia, I think largely due to our apartment.  Our apartment did not have it's bricked power washed to perfection.  Likewise, the floors were not replaced with perfect looking hardwood, but instead the original floors and bricks were restored to imperfection.  This is what I like to see in most photos, a truth about the imperfect subject being shot, unless of course the subject is supposed to be perfect.  I am not saying that photo's should look crappy and have scratches, just that they are more enjoyable to look at when they use technicolor.

photo of brick in our Philly apartment

1. Take the Photo to Convert

First, you will need to make sure that your digital camera can take RAW photos.  You will be processing your photo into an HDR shot.  This is important as you will be using photomatix, and unless you plan to take a series of bracketed photos then you should use RAW.  If you have a canon powershot you can refer to my old post here that explains how to hack your camera to take RAW.  Also, another point about RAW over the jpeg bracket approach is that the jpeg will have less detail than the RAW.

Second, make sure that what you are shooting has a good amount of contrasting color.  It makes for a better picture when the colors are vibrant.

Take the photo.  For this tutorial I am going to use the following photo, which I took quickly from a parking garage in Philadelphia.  I didn't use a tripod or anything, just took the photo quickly before getting into my car.

2. Create an HDR type Image

Now that you have a RAW or bracketed collection of photos, you should create an HDR version of the photo in photomatix or photoshop.  You should use the tonemapping tool in photomatix to generate the desired colors.  This is really where you are going to get a lot of your retro effect from.  you should play with the image until the colors really start to look old school. 

I like to turn down the light smoothing, turn up the color saturation and strength.  Here is a screenshot with what settings I like to use.  But remember, each photo is going to be different, so you really will need to play with all of these settings for your photo.

The result of these settings is the photo below.

3. Apply Retro Color's in Photoshop

For the color you can use a number of different filters or actions.  You can even use a combination of these to produce the desired retro colors.  Alien Skin has a Color Film plugin that you can use to make the photo look more like it was shot on a 1970s Kodak Ektachrome film.  I have not tried this out yet, but it does look like it might work well.  Instead, I have tried a couple of free Action's that are available from deviantArt.  My favorite is the Polaroid Generator, and using the T600 Wide Format action it provides.  But before you do this, you can apply a grain effect to the photo, so it looks textured, like it was scanned in.

Under Filter->Texture->Grain you can create a grain effect.  Here are some settings you can try to create a vertical grain. 

The key with the grain is that you want it to be somewhat subtle.  Therefore, I would suggest copying the photo layer first, and then applying the grain to the top layer.  After this turn down the opacity on the top layer, like the example below.

After you have the photo in good shape, in a retro type look, you should run the polaroid or similar action to complete things.  Here is the result after running the polaroid generator action.

Here is another version of this same RAW image in retro form without a grain:

And if you want you could even apply some funky borders to make it look like it is a scan of a slide.

Another interesting effect is blurring part of the image, so it looks a little out of focus.  Here is what that looks like:

Other Examples:

Finally

I hope you realized from all of the above examples that your content doesn't need to be interesting to generate a unique photo.  All of these photos are of pretty boring stuff, some tree's and buildings and a little sky.  The take away is that you don't have to take photo's of interesting objects, but instead you can get away with taking pictures of interesting color combinations.  Not everything will look good or better with retro colors, but it definitely allows you more flexibility with your subject matter.

Read the complete post at http://renaissauce.com/thoughts/convert-normal-photos-to-retro-photos/