holy moly it almost look like a foto!!

Special thanks to Nathan for being extra foxy with the Elvis glasses.

please shove the kiddies under the bed, they ought not to sees this

Isn’t he just adorable?

Actually the above photo is a retouch. The original is below, but I had to use the “Cutefy” filter in Photoshop because I didn’t want all the childrens to have nightmares. If you note the mustache’s resemblance to that of a certain 20th century dictator, you realize that he’s not actually begging for food but throwing some kind of salute. Parents, hide the kiddies’ eyes before you scroll down!

Jérôme in Paris, having a drink before dinner on a café terrace in Le Marais.

I wanted to retouch this in the style of an old film still. To accomplish this look I converted to black and white, used curves and levels for contrast, added vignetting with gradients, added a simulated 800 ISO grain, and then dodged and burned.

I also stumbled on a new trick that is very useful for this style. The problem with the dodging and burning tools is that they are not easily reversible. You have to apply changes directly to the photo, not to a separate layer, so the only thing you can really do (apart from the history brush, if you haven’t changed the size of the canvas) is duplicate the layer to dodge and burn, then mask it to allow the original underneath to come through the parts you want to “undo.”

So instead, I bring out highlights by creating a layer above the photo, change the blending mode to Soft Light, and then paint on the empty layer with a black or white brush. It’s easily reversible, since you can use the eraser if you don’t like something you’ve done. You can also always reduce the opacity of the layer if you go overboard.