Faking that "photocopied" look ?

I'm working with some typed documents from WW II, which were put to microfiche, and then photocopied. The governmental institution "owning" them charges per page for reproduction in a show. But being historical, they have no qualms at all about their actual content (aka the copy) being used without payment.

So what I'm trying to do is replicate the general feel of the photocopied documents. I've come up with some neat ways to give that feel with the text. But what about that cheap Xerox style for the background paper? Has anyone had any experience with this? Any hints at all for making the background look less than pristine?



- Justin Barham -

Why don't you scan something that looks like what you need and use it as a background layer in PS - something that is quite messy to begin with would be good, then you can back off the opacity in PS for a more subtle look.

Even just a small corner of one of the documents that has nothing on it would be useful, because you can just duplicate and blend until you have a whole page of it.

That seems like good advice Jude. I'll do just that.

I'm back at it tomorrow morning. I'll let you know how it turns out.

FYI, these are decoded Enigma messages, which is pretty interesting, if you're into that kinda stuff.



- Justin Barham -

yeah thats a great idea.
you should get an old blank page, somehtng that might have some karks on it to begin with.
try crannking up the lghtness/ carkness settings on hte photocopier,
and play with exta noise or even just levels once you get it into PS.

nick

Oh cool - the Enigma code was brilliant. I've seen some good docos on it over here. Good luck with it.

Thanks for the advice. As it turns out, I had the "faster is better" on these faked stills. So I just used some gradients, noise, burning, and dodging, etc. on the backgrounds. We ended up doing some further tweaking, and everything actually looks really really good. It's so much easier to make things look bad than good. The show went to color correction tonight.

I still struggle with Photoshop. It's the interface and conventions that drive me nuts. But I learn a little more every time I use it.

Thanks again.



- Justin Barham -