Digital Light & Color

I have dabbled with restoration of old images, but until today had never tried the reverse process – aging a new image. Adding noise, softening of edges, and using a multipoint gradient to control HSV variations were straightforward. However, when it came to adding stains, chips, tears, and scratches, I couldn’t come up with realistic effects.

Any suggestions?

I have two suggestions. You might be able to simulate realistic tears by photographing actual tears and merging them with the image using composite. If you make the tears in a totally black print, you may not even need any masks.

For stains, you might want to try Tint through a mask. The mask could be a photograph of some pooled dark liquid on a light surface.

Another possibility would be to print the image, actually distress the print and then rephotograph it.

I haven't actually tried any of these ideas but would be interested in knowing if they were at all helpful.

Kiril

Thanks, Kiril.

I should have thought of those ways -- to get realism, make use of the real thing :)

Bob, Kiril, a way I like to stain / age / tint images is the use of tea stained paper.
I use paper from a sketching block which is not so smooth and takes on the liquid well, and normal black tea.
I use either a brush for a uniform pattern or spilling some tea on the paper for irregular shapes, or placing a cup on the paper for a characteristic ring.
After the paper has dried I make a scan and use Composite with the Filter option to "age " and stain my image.
Below the original image, the paper scan and the composite result:

Neat way to do it, Dieter. Thank you. [I guess one could easily build a library of tea stains. :)]