Hipstamatic-Ize Your Photos!

July 1, 2010

I love the iPhone app Hipstamatic. It is an app that Hipstmatic says “brings back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past.” Basically it makes any old picture look pretty darn cool. Unfortunately, I don’t have an iPhone and even if I did, I love to take pictures with my real camera.

I thought there must be a way, without being a photoshop genius, to give my pictures this awesome vintage look. It took a lot of digging but I found a great little FREE program to download and a few very easy steps to make any photo hip in any way you want!

Start by downloading Photoscape. It’s a free photo editor that lets you do tons of things to your pictures! I have just started playing with it but it is easy and fun! I will be spending a ton of time with this little gem!

First, select your run of the mill photo. I love this picture of Sophia on the beach and thought it would look great with a vintage twist!

Next, upload your photo into the Photoscape editor.

Below the photo you will see a bunch of buttons that allow you to change anything about the photo.

For this picture I took the following steps:

Filter – Film Effect – Cross Process High. Cross Processing in the real world of photography is the procedure of deliberately processing photographic film in a chemical solution intended for a different type of film (from Wikipedia).

Filter – Film Effect – Portra High. Portra is an effect that is meant to simulate the high quality Kodak film that is used for weddings and portraits to give great skin tones and a very fine grain. I just liked how it looked!

Bright, Color – Colorize. For this picture I chose a color value 20, saturation of 255 and saturation level of 41%. The higher the level, the stronger the color. This is where you will give your pictures a different tone of green or orange or whatever suits your fancy!

Filter – Vignetting. Click on Vignetting and choose your shadow like edges. There are a bunch to choose from and they are fun to play around with!

Backlight. (+/- 100%) This is what I chose. It gives a really cool light to the photo. Play around with this too. You can see the changes as you make them so it is super easy to change your mind.

Finally, the real Hipstamtic cool factor comes from the frame. This was what I could never find but in Photoscape there are a few that mimic that cool old look. I chose Cali 12 for this photo, which has a rough edge around the entire photo.

I ended up with the fabulous and very hip photo of Sophia at the beach!

I went ahead and hipped up a photo of Miles and Violet as well because it is just so much fun! Here is the original adorable picture of my two cuddle bugs!

I chose a Portra Low setting here with colorization of 25/128/50% for the more orange tones and I love it! I also chose the slightly more rugged Cali 5 frame.

Now don’t you have a couple pics that could use a little more hip? Have fun and please share your experience in the comments so that we can all create some very cool photos!

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