Add Vintage Color To Your Video Footage

So a really popular thing going on right now is making video footage look more antique and vintage.  There are a lot of expensive softwares out there with presets that will help you do this, like Nick Campbell's Vintage Film for Looks.  But I figure why spend the money on something you can do easily yourself?

The easiest way for me to think about it is, how do I achieve this effect in Photoshop when working with a still image, and then how can I translate this to video. Well I just happened to find a tutorial on the Tuts+ Network in the PhotoTuts section. Click here to find it.

After going through that tutorial you will notice that a lot of the effect is achieved through playing with curves and then adding a few adjustment layers as you see fit. In short, experiment. So I went into Color with a piece of footage I shot camping last week with my HD Go Pro camera.

The first thing I did was take the curves and mimic exactly what the tutorial showed me (see above).

Next I just played around with adjustment layers and effects to get the look I wanted. As you can see I mimicked the tutorial's Magenta hue adjustment layer by adding a low opacity Magenta color to the effect hierarchy and I just added some grain to give it a more dated feel (see above).

Voila, it is just that simple. Some other things to keep in mind are keeping your contrast low, or lowering it. I eventually want to add some vignetting and blur for depth of field.