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Create a Dark and Gritty Effect in Photoshop

by | Oct 8, 2010 | Photoshop, Tutorials | 4 comments

First, take your image and duplicate the background layer, so you can go back to your original if you need to. Hide the background layer and work from your copy. Go into the channels panel and hold down the command key (CTRL on the PC) and click on the RGB channel to load the luminosity as a selection.

Go back to your layers panel and Create a new layer above your current one and hold down shift and delete to bring up your fill dialog box. Choose to fill your selection with black and then hit command +D (Ctrl + D on the PC) to deselect your selection. Hit Command +I (Ctrl +I on the PC to invert the layer. Then create a levels adjustment layer  and bring the right slider to the left, to lighten some areas of your image. In the adjustments panel, click the third icon from the left to clip this adjustment to the layer below. This should give you a pale version of the image.

Create another levels adjustment layer and slide the left slider to the right to get a really dark, shadowed version of your original image. This gives the image a dark and brooding look, with the shadows in the right places. This can be done to taste, depending on the image.

Finally, go back to the duplicate of your background image and go to Filter> Texture> Grain. Choose around 50-60 for the Intensity and 40-50 for the contrast. For the grain type, choose horizontal. This gives it an eerie television effect, which might be good for a Halloween effect for a movie.

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