I used two images as overlays to this at about 20% opacity. One is a picture of an old, cracked
Spanish stucco wall that had really neat pocking and some cracks running through it (which I thought would do well to represent random grain, etc). The other was a
dust/fuzz/fingerprint-on-glass image that I found on the net and inverted.
First, I imported the RAW image to Lightroom, dropping an antique grayscale preset on it, and touching up the contrast and black levels. Then, using the "Edit in Photoshop CS3" function of Lightroom, I imported the .dng file to PS. Then I hit the image with the Add Noise filter at 10% and Gaussian/monochromatic. Then, I dropped the two overlays that I converted a using the same Lightroom antique grayscale preset on top of the image in PS, rotated them randomly and sized them to match my image, and then adjusted their opacity to about 20%. After that, I dropped the border on top of the whole stack and sized it. Saving the file, I went back into Lightroom and made sure the contrast and black levels were where I wanted them (since the overlays take out some contrast and blacks). And there ya go.
It's neat to have something new and fun to play with. To make the distressing of the images more random, I started distorting and twisting the overlays around after the second attempt. I think it turned out okay that way. The only other thing I might try with these (aside from maybe locating another border to try out) is to "defocus" them a little bit. Things seem to be just a little too sharp. I know that with the quality of the lenses back in the 1800s and the length of the exposures of fixed-stop cameras, there always seems to be a little bit of focus and motion blur to the image.
All-in-all, though, I like the way these turned out. Hopefully some of the reenactors that I gave my biz card to do as well.
