Photoshop Tutorial: Getting that great X-PRO LOMO look

Let me explain the title real quick, in case any readers aren’t in the know yet. LOMO is a russian optics company that makes cameras. They use the word Lomography to mean a wide-angle, shoot-from-the-hip, distorted colors, plastic lenses, expired film kind of photo asthetic.

Another thing a lot of Lomographers like to do is x-pro, or cross processing. This is the act of developing one kind of film in the chemicals meant to develop another kind of fim. For a lot of photographers, this means shooting onto slide film and bribing a friend who works at a developing lab to develop it as normal film.

This tutorial is fairly quick and easy, we’ll show you how to get that great x-pro lomo look. We’ll tweak the color, explore a new method of vignetting and definitely widen it up and blur it up a little, since most of these nice, cheap cameras have nice, cheap lenses. And funny names; I have a Diana, a Holga, and a Lubitel myself.

Open an image and let’s get started. (If you’ve been working on the image previous to this, make sure to flatten all the layers before you start.)

Step 1.  The first thing we’re going to do is widen up the lens angle a little bit. Go to Filter > Distort > Lens Correction and drag the top slider (Remove Distortion) a tiny bit to the left. Don’t overdo it, but make it look like the lens warps out a little.

Step 2. Next, copy the image layer and hit Q to enter quickmask mode. Press D to make sure you’re painting in black, and B to select the brush tool. Select a nice, big, fuzzy brush, at full opacity and a low flow, paint in most of the image. Stay away from the corners.

Step 3. When you have kind of a big, red, fuzzy circle, press Q again to exit quickmask mode. Go to Select > Modify > Feather and enter 10 to 20 into the box. Press OK. 

Step 4. Use Filter > Blur > Lens Blur to give it just a little bit of low-quality blur. I used a triangle shape with Radius: 8, Blade Curvature: 67, and everything else at 0. Press OK.

Step 5. Press Q again, B for your big, fuzzy, low-flow brush, and paint in almost all the image again, staying away from the corners like before. Then press Q again and use Select > Modify > Feather at the same number as before. Create a Curves Adjustment Layer and drag that line down in a couple places to make the very corners of the image really dark. 

Step 6. Create another Curves Adjustment Layer. Give your image a tiny little “S curve” to start out with, then go to the Red Channel. Drag the top right point over to the left a little less than one quarter of the way. Then move the bottom left point over to the right a little more than a quarter of the way. 

Step 7. Open the Green Channel. Create a dot around the top right quarter of the line and drag it up and to the left just a little bit. Go to the Blue Channel and make a dot in the same place, but drag this one down and to the right a little bit. (see screenshot).

Step 8. Press Q again, B for your big, soft, fuzzy, low flow brush, and this time just draw a big circle almost the whole height of your image, not quite centered, not quite perfect, in fact the less perfect the better it will look.

Step 9. When you’re done, press Q to exit quickmask, Select > Modify > Feather again for a little more than your last number, and then create a Curves Adjustment Layer. Make a dot in the middle of the line and drag it down about 1/4 the way toward the bottom right of the square. 

And you’re done! Your image looks like it was shot on a little plastic toy camera with film that was processed wrong. Pretty neat, isn’t it? Fool around with the settings I gave you in these steps to find the numbers which work best for you, and have fun!