How do you achieve this vintage/mute effect on a photo?

Thank you so much guys! Great answers and great tips too. Although I couldn't quite achieve those same results with the techniques suggested here, I did get close. I also found a youtube video on creating a Mute Effect that got my image really close to the sample image.

Again, Thank you so much!

To get close to the sample image:

Make levels layer with values: R output 56 and 187, G output 71 and 204, B output 94 and 186.

Then make another Levels layer between the image and another levels so you can adjust the clipping on whites and blacks easily.

Depending the image you might need to adjust also the contrast in middle tones.

soft light vintage look in photoshop | photo effects [ Episode 2 ] - YouTube This is a helpful tut, take a look.

You could also try adding one or more adjustment layers for Color Lookup. Once you add a Color Lookup, select the drop down menu in the Properties panel. While it's selected, use your arrow keeps to try out what works best. You might try something like Futuristic Bleak or Foggy Night. You can get interesting effects by adding more than one and adjusting the opacity on the adjustment layer. Switching the order of the adjustment layers also produces different results.

It looks like to me what we used to call cross processing. In the days of film we put a color negative film in the e-6 process or a transparency film in a c-41 process. I have best been able to duplicate it with Nik Filters Color Efex pro4 a free photoshop plugin from google. Google purchased Nik's a few years back.

Aloha

Randy

This is easily done with a Levels adjustment.

• Pull the shadow input slider to the right to clip the shadows
• Pull the shadow output slider to the right to lift those clipped shadows
• Pull the highlight output sliders, per channel, to the left for the muted highlights. Adjust channels individually to achieve the right highlight color cast

I would say that using some adjustment layers > both photo filters and maybe a saturation layer > would get you close:

BEFORE:

AFTER: