Easy and Creative Grunge Effects

Grunge photography has become the latest trend in photography.  This tutorial is going to walk you through 6 very easy steps to taking your photo to the grunge level.

In this tutorial, we will be increasing the contrast, adding grunge effects to the image as a whole, adding tram lines to the right and left, and finally warming the image through the use of photo filters.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have learned where to find free software (if you don’t have Photoshop), and know how to create your own grunge effects.

What You Need – First of all, you will need a digital photo to work with.  And second, you will need a program that you will use to edit your photo.  For this tutorial, I’m working with Adobe Photoshop.  If you do not have Photoshop, you can get away with using another freeware program like Paint.net, but your end results may vary.

Step 1 – We’ll start with this photo.  For best results, start with a color photograph with nice bold colors.  This photo was taken at South Of The Border; you can see the entire Flickr photo set here.  Be sure to save a backup copy of your original file.  Never work on an image without having at least one other copy somewhere else.  If you are an advanced user, you can use layers, but to keep things as simple as possible, I’m going to go ahead without layers.

Step 2 – Adjust the contrast by going to: Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast…
Set the contrast as high as possible without going overboard.  In this case, I’ve set it to 100.  Sometimes you can take ordinary photographs and make them outstanding using this method, but let’s continue to step 3.

Step 3 – Adjust the contrast by going to: Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast…
I have increased the contrast by another 100 points.  In the “old days”, before digital cameras came to the photography scene, this effect was often accomplished by processing the exposed film in ways contrary to the manufacturers instructions.  This was known as, “cross-processing“, and remains quite popular today.  Flickr has a huge group devoted to Cross-Processing.

Step 4 – This is the heart and soul of the grunge effects, and it’s wide-open to artist interpretation.  For this image, I went online and downloaded some grunge scratch brushes for Photoshop.  Instead of simply using one brush to cover the entire image, you can get a much better effect by using multiple brushes in a random, almost haphazard fashion.  I set the opacity around 60, though I encourage you to experiment with different brushes and opacities.  There are a lot of grunge and scratch brushes out there, so it should be very easy to find them once you know what you are looking for.

Step 5 – I’ve added some edge effects.  These “tram lines” were created using a masking tape brush, the opacity set around 80.  Tram lines are what appear on your photographic print if you have your photos finished at a cut-rate photo finisher who has neglected to clean the wheels in their printing machine.  This effect is taken to the extreme for this grunge tutorial.

Step 6 – The last step is to apply a warming filter to give the image that final dirty, grungy-like color.  Go to Image > Adjustments >Photo Filter…
For the purposes of this tutorial, I used Warming Filter (85) at 50% Density.  Different filters have different effects, and the density level really has a profound effect on the final image.

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Thomas Slatin

My company specializes in writing, photography, and website design. My father gave me my first camera when I was a small child, and it quickly became my most prized possession. I was also fascinated with exploring places others rarely ever ventured, such as abandoned places, buildings, and railroad cars.

As time went on, I formed a business centered around my passion; living larger-than-life adventures, and sharing the photographic journey on my website.

www.tomslatin.com