Hudson in Krita, another easy vintage effect

Welcome to anoth­er episode of Too Hip for Instagram, the series of irreg­u­lar tuto­ri­als where we fig­ure out how to recre­ate Instagram’s looks in Krita. On the menu today is the Hudson effect.

Hudson com­bines a cold tint with sev­er­al vin­tage effects like vignetting and chro­mat­ic aber­ra­tion. It also sports a radi­al “mixed” tint.

The look in curves

Hudson has a very pecu­liar way of look­ing. And pecu­liar looks require pecu­liar curves. Apply a curves fil­ter (CTRL+M) and copy these curves. They don’t have to be exact­ly the same, just sim­i­lar enough. Note this is only one fil­ter, just change the chan­nel using the dropdown. 

I got these curves from Gram of the day’s tuto­r­i­al.

Chromatic Aberration in Krita

Chromatic Aberration is a fail­ure of a lens to focus all col­ors to the same point. You can see it as “fringes” of col­or along the areas that sep­a­rate dark and bright parts of the image. You might think this is a bad thing, and old school pho­tog­ra­phers cer­tain­ly did! 

But it adds a cer­tain charm to images.

Adding Chromatic Aberration in Krita is eas­i­er than it sounds. Let’s start by going to the lay­er’s prop­er­ties by right-click­ing on it (or press­ing F3). In this dia­log we can deac­ti­vate indi­vid­ual chan­nels and take con­trol on how they are com­bined. Deactivate all chan­nels except red. Now dupli­cate the lay­er, go to prop­er­ties again and leave only the blue chan­nel enabled. Repeat this again for the green channel. 

Now we have the same image as before but with every chan­nel spread into a sep­a­rate lay­er. What we can do now is select any of these and use the trans­form tool to change their size, gen­er­at­ing the fringes effect.

You can go as crazy as you want, but unless you are going for a sci-fi glitchy effect, sub­tle­ty is the key.

When you are done, dupli­cate the lay­ers and merge them togeth­er. It’s a good idea to keep the orig­i­nal lay­ers dis­abled as backup.

Completing the effect

Did I men­tion every retro effect looks bet­ter with film grain? Let me insist.
Add some film grain as we did with Mayfair, either by down­load­ing it or gen­er­at­ing it with Krita’s noise filter.

Now we move onto the mixed tint­ing. Hudson is cold­er towards the cen­ter, so let’s cre­ate a new lay­er and fill it with a radi­al gra­di­ent. This gra­di­ent goes from #8099be to #21fb1b.

The last stop is adding a vignette. We already cov­ered vignetting in the Mayfair tuto­r­i­al, how­ev­er in this case we should use the “man­u­al” way so we can keep the lay­er structure.

1. Make a new layer
2. Fill it with black
3. Use the cir­cle select tool (J) to select the cen­ter of the image and delete it
4. Deselect (CTRL+SHIFT+A) and apply a Gaussian Blur fil­ter with a huge radius
5. Lower the opac­i­ty to about 10%

Is there any oth­er effects you guys want to see? Let me know in the com­ments!
Also you might be inter­est­ed in the Nashville effect from earlier