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!
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