Old Photo Effect with Fireworks MX

April 12, 2007

Assumed knowledge: Navigation of Fireworks MX
Concepts covered: Adding a series of effects to bitmaps, flattening and merging down layersOver times photographs often form their very own style. They age and look worn, brown and faded. In this tutorial you will learn how to create an effect that you can use to make a new picture look older.

Before you do anything select a suitable Bitmap picture that you would like to use in your piece. Open up Fireworks MX and load the picture that you would like to use. Click on the picture and then from the Properties menu click the + on the effect and select Other->Convert to alpha.

This will make your image transparent and in Grayscale color. Next create a rectangle and set its size equal to that of the picture?’s size and then set the x and y values to both be 0 This will make the rectangle fit perfectly to your background. Next fill in the rectangle with brown via the rectangle?’s properties menu. Make sure that the rectangle has no border.

Select the layer of your picture and from the effects menu select Adjust color->Color fill. Then choose an appropriate color that would make the image look faded. I suggest a lighter brown color to your rectangle.

Select the rectangle again and from the properties inspector select an appropriate texture from the range and then set the alpha to be around 9%. This is the effect that I chose:

Once you are finished with your texture. Right click on the rectangle and choose Flatten Selection. Once you have done that the rectangle will become a bitmap. Then select your picture?’s layer and press Ctrl + E to make the two images become one or you can convert them into a symbol by choosing Modify->Symbol->Convert to Symbol.

From there click on the whole image and from the Properties Menu add an effect. Select Alien Skin Splat LE->Edges. Alien Skin Splat LE is a free Plug-in that comes with Fireworks MX. The options that I suggest for an old Photo effect can be seen in the screenshot.

Make sure that you tick the transparent fill box so that we can do the last effect. The last effect is a simple one and can be one via the Properties Menu again. This time select Shadow and Glow->Drop Shadow. You can toy around with the options here but the default ones should be sufficient. This should finish your piece. Export it if you would like. Make sure that it?’s a transparent GIF. This was what I managed to create: