Every vintage photographer nowadays is filling their Instagram feed with monochromatic pictures – those having sepia-tinted backgrounds, yellow vignettes, or are simply black-and-white and promise a trip down the memory lane.

However, the vintage filters are way past their prime. With the constant technological innovation, these vintage photographs for sale cut out a sorry image. Although they look a bit retro, the continual innovation of the filter and lens technology makes them look nothing more than a shoddy frame from only a decade back.

If you are inspired to go online and upload your old photographs for sale, you definitely wouldn’t want someone to comment that these are nothing but a throwback to the early days of photography using the Lumia or the Xperia phones!

The evolution of smartphone cameras and editing apps

The initial smartphone cameras were obviously better than their VGA counterparts. However, the average erstwhile smartphone cameras were mainly displaying only –

• Low-resolution images
• Washed-out colours
• Fuzzy edges, etc.

Since smartphone cameras were a far cry from what they are today, photo filters started growing in popularity. They gradually started offering a quick fix for the bad image quality, vignettes, lens blur, highlighting specific details while putting others out of focus, providing high-end contrast to make the images appear more life-like, etc.

Overall, the evolution of the photo filters offered a great sense of nostalgia and a trip down the memory lane and one of the best alternatives to photography enthusiasts who could not afford high-end DSLRs or film cameras.

These days, even old photographs for sale are uploaded on various international and indigenous websites, which are actually clicked with smartphones and rendered using high-end optical filters. Since almost every smartphone camera is advancing leaps and bounds with every new generation release, in-built photo editing applications and filters leave no stone unturned to create every desired effect with smartphone photography.

However, for the true photography enthusiast, who still is entwined in old photography applications and finds natural glory in utilising a vintage optic for creating a unique look, manually editing pictures and creating your signature aesthetic is a simple yet significant step forward!

So let’s check out some of the best photography and manual edit tips and tricks to create your own series of vintage photographs for sale.

Want to edit and create vintage photographs for sale manually? Try out these tried-and-tested techniques.

If you want to coax a gallery owner to put up your old photographs for sale on his online art exhibition, you need to ensure that they represent an era gone by.

How to do that successfully? Let’s check out.

1.     Usage of faded colours

When trying to emulate the golden age of film photography and lure buyers to buy art online India, you have to render the photos with the same faded colours, flatter motifs or lost details. One of the prime reasons was that there was no good place to store old film photographs, and holding them within pieces of paper or photo albums for a long time had a degrading effect of time on them.

Achieve that vintage look by reducing the saturation. Following this, you can add some contrast or some red tint and create an iconic image of an epoch gone by! Another option is to start by adding some ‘fade’ to your pictures, bringing out some details on the image foregrounds and making them flatter.

2.     Adding vintage objects instantly causes you to time-travel

If you want to create old photographs for sale online across virtual art galleries like Artshoppy.com, you don’t always need the technical know-how to reverse the age of modern pictures and develop ones that exude vintage flavours. Instead, you can incorporate particular objects in your shots that immediately remind you of days gone by.

Incorporating vintage cameras, rotary phones, compasses, monocles, etc., in a modern context can bring back the known yet long-forgotten aroma of a bygone age.

3.     A slight blur takes you down memory lane

Because of high resolution and millions of pixels and dpi, the modern cameras click the sharpest images – down to the most minute details. Since the cameras of yore employed less sensitive lenses and rendered very little detail, one of the best ways to achieve the same is by starting with a technically brilliant photo, razor-sharp and adding blur to your heart’s extent!

Reducing sharpness, adding blur, and focusing on things other than the subject while shooting will give you the intended effect of a less sharp and less-than-perfect ancestor of a current picture.

4.     Monochrome – the trusted ally for all vintage photographers

Although black and white has carved out a niche for itself and is not really retro, removing all colours and stripping a photograph of every hue, tone, shade, etc., gives a timeless feel to it. Even if the content is contemporary, you can use a monochromatic photos as vintage photographs for sale.

Final words

If you wish to buy art online India, there are a myriad of options, including virtual art galleries. Similarly, the concept of vintage photography and retro has evolved. The fast pace of lives, technological prowess, etc., quickly renders the aesthetics that we consider avant-garde today become old-fashioned and retro very quickly.

So, instead of capturing time in frames, it is better to capture the frames against chronologies – a discussion that might invoke newer concepts with time.