Through the viewfinder

Recently my mate dan (aka smoothfoote) has inspired me to have a go at creating some fake TTV photographs. In a nutshell TTV technique is a type of digital photography that emulates film photography in 'box' cameras, creating a vintage look complete with the dust and grain and scratches. If you are a "proper" photographer you will create a contraption that will allow you to use your digital camera to take pictures "through the viewfinder" of an older camera. However I don't really have enough photography "properness" or the patience to make, let alone lug around said contraption so I thought I'd turn to good old photoshop and the wonderful free-download resources on flickr to create the technique, and why the hell not!

It took me a while to trawl the internet for a decent tutorial and ended up just mashing various tips together so I thought that I'd be useful and post what I did here.

First of all you need (suprise) a photograph you want to overlay the effect on. Then what you need is a photograph someone has taken of a white background who has the proper TTV set up. There are two great places on Flickr you can get these from: The Noise and Dust Through the Viewfinder group and Nadistock .

Armed with these two photos launch both in the almighty photoshop. Drag the TTV image onto you photo and draag the corners to fit the size of your photograph. Then click on the lower righthand layers tab in CS2 called 'Normal' change this to 'Multiply', this turns it into a transparent layer, you then have to play with it, fiddle with the opacity, colour levels, contrast ect. Also use the eraser tool (lower the opacity and make sure it has a feathery edge to reduce the border or make the center of the photograph stand out a bit more).

You may also want to fiddle with you photograph too. I used the 'pinch' tool to distort it a bit, the saturation and hues and added a bit of extra "noise".

"Save as" and hey presto, one fake ttv...here is my first effort: