Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we're going to look at how to give a photo a gritty, overprocessed look to it with extreme levels of contrast and sharpening, noise and washed out colors. Part of the effect will be created with a technique normally used as an advanced way of sharpening an image, but in this case, we'll be taking things well beyond the boundaries of common sense. This is the sort of thing that would probably get you fired if you were supposed to be doing serious photo editing and retouching work, but I've seen this photo effect used time and time again in advertising, and while the final result looks rather harsh, Photoshop makes creating the effect quick and painless, as we'll see!

Here's the photo I'll be using for this tutorial:

And here's how it will look when we're done:

Let's get started!

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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

With our photo newly opened in Photoshop, let's begin the way we normally do with our photo effects tutorials, and that's by duplicating the Background layer so we'll be free to do whatever we like to our image without harming the original pixel information. If we look in our Layers palette, we can see our photo sitting on the Background layer, which is currently the only layer we have:

To duplicate the layer, go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choose New, and then choose Layer via Copy, or for a much faster way, simply use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Either way creates a copy of the Background layer, and if we look again in the Layers palette, we can see the newly created copy, named "Layer 1", sitting above the Background layer:

Step 2: Apply The High Pass Filter

I mentioned at the beginning that part of this effect will be created using a technique normally used for advanced image sharpening, and this is it. With "Layer 1" selected in the Layers palette, go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Other, and then choose High Pass:

This brings up the High Pass filter dialog box, and you'll see your photo in the document window become filled with gray. If you want to learn more about how to use the High Pass filter for image sharpening, be sure to check out our Sharpen Images With The High Pass Filter tutorial in our Photo Editing section, but just to quickly summarize, if you look down at the bottom of the dialog box, you'll see the Radius option. If we were using the High Pass filter to apply a normal amount of sharpening to our image, we'd want to keep the Radius value very low, usually somewhere between 1-2 pixels. At this low setting, only the edges of objects in the photo become visible, while the rest of the photo remains solid gray. This allows us to sharpen only the edges of objects, leaving the rest of the photo unsharpened, which usually gives us great results.

For this effect though, we don't want to limit our sharpening to just the edges of objects. We want our sharpening to extend out across most of the image. To do that, we need to increase our Radius value quite a bit. How high you set your Radius value will depend on the size of the image you're working on, but generally speaking, somewhere between 30-35 pixels seems to work well. If you're working on a small image for the web, you'll need to use a much lower setting, possibly around 9-10 pixels. The idea is to keep an eye on your image in the document window and drag the Radius slider to the right until there's very little of the solid gray color remaining and you can clearly see your photo underneath it. I'm going to drag my Radius slider to a value of around 33 pixels:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box. Here's my image after applying the High Pass filter:

Step 3: Change The Blend Mode Of The Layer To "Hard Light"

To actually create the sharpening effect, we need to change the blend mode of our layer. Normally, if we were doing serious photo editing work, we'd be changing the blend mode to Overlay, which is one of the blend modes in Photoshop that boosts contrast in an image. Since we're taking things to extreme levels here, we want something that's going to give us even more of a contrast boost than what the Overlay blend mode can offer, so go up to the blend mode option at the top of the Layers palette, which by default is set to "Normal", and change the blend mode to Hard Light:

The Hard Light blend mode also boosts image contrast but to an even greater degree than Overlay does. Here's my image after changing the blend mode of "Layer 1" to Hard Light. Notice how the contrast in the image has increased:

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