Holga Effect in Photoshop – a tutorial

I had a look round on the internet recently for a decent tutorial on getting a Holga camera effect in Photoshop and although there were a few decent ones, I found I ended up using bits from each and adding a few touches of my own to get the best results, so I figured I would publish it here for you to take a look at.

1. Open up a suitable image.

2. Duplicate the layer for comparison later on.

3. Go to your “channels” tab and click on the “red” channel. Select all (apple+a) and copy (apple+c), then click back onto the RGB channel.

4. Go back to your layers tab and paste the layer in. It should appear in black and white. Make sure it is above your original layer image and set the layer style to “overlay”. This should make the image look really contrasty without bleaching out lighter areas or making it too noisy.

5. Click on the little black and white circle at the bottom of your layers palette to create a new adjustment layer and choose “hue and saturation”. Crank the saturation up. I tend to go for about +40, but it depends on your image. Make sure the adjustment layer is above all your other layers. Doing it this way means you can come back to change the saturation later if you want.

6. Choose the rectangular marquee tool and set the feather options to around 1/10th of the smallest side of your image. So, for example, my image was 3456px by 2306px. So, the shorter side is 2306 and about a tenth of that is 230px. Then, drag a rectangular selection over the entire image (doing apple+a doesn’t work for this). You should see that a rectangle with curved corners is selected. Now invert the selection (shift+apple+i).

7. Make a new layer and fill your selection with black and set the layer to “overlay” to create the famous dark edges of the Holga effect. You may then want to duplicate the layer to increase the effect.

8. Put all your current layers into a group together, then select all (apple+a) and copy everything from all layers (shift+apple+c) and paste it on top (apple+v).

9. Duplicate this new layer.

10. We’re now going to add a lens blur to the TOP image layer. Go to filter>blur>lens blur. Now, this top layer is going to be the outer edges of the image, which are always blurrier on a Holga image, so don’t worry about the quality at the moment. We want the edges to look quite blurry. For my image (which is pretty large) I set my radius to 18.

11. Now we need to take out part of this image, to reveal the non-blurry layer underneath, but we want to have the blurriness fading out towards the edges. So, take your circular marquee tool and give it the same feather value as you used before for your dark edges. Then drag a circle over the main subject of your image – if it’s a portrait, drag around the person in it for example. Then hit delete and this should reveal the layer below, which is not blurry.

12. Depending on the quality of the original image, you may also want to put a very slight blur on the image underneath too, so it doesn’t look too sharp. I used a radius of 8px on mine.

13. This last part is the part I think makes it feel really authentic. Holgas tend to distort the image slightly in a unique way. Select your top 2 layers and merge them (apple+e). Now go to edit>transform>warp. Pull the top two dots on either side down slightly, so that you are creating a curve to the image. This creates a real Holga-style distortion.

And there you are! Your image should now be Holga-fied.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

Cassie