I've always liked the look of Lomo photos (typically bright colored and highly saturated with darkened edges), but I didn't want to worry about getting another camera or messing with film & scanning. Yesterday I asked people if there was a Photoshop filter that could turn a regular photo into a Lomo-style photo. Several people responded with the Melancholytron filter and a tutorial on achieving the Lomo effect without using filters.

Since I didn't feel like downloading anything, I tried the tutorial. I started with this picture:

I took this photo on my first trip to NYC in January 2002; it's the Vesuvio Bakery on Prince Street in Soho.

I deviated only slightly from the directions, using one of the overlayed feathered black layers and decreasing the opacity of the white gradient layer to below 50%. Here's the result:

Pretty cool. Now, I wish I could get my camera to do this automatically...it would be fun to slip into Lomo mode now and then.

This entry is part of the kottke.org weblog, of which Eight things I learned this week, 03 is the latest entry.

Within this weblog, this entry belongs in the Photography categories and was published in February 2003.

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