The Mayfair filter in Krita in 3 easy steps

So you have fin­ished your newest Blender mas­ter­piece, or have a pho­to that you wish could look bet­ter? How about an Instagram fil­ter right in Krita? Today we will look at how we can repli­cate Mayfair.

This fil­ter has a warm, pink tone with sub­tle vignetting. I’m also adding a bit of grain that was­n’t in the orig­i­nal fil­ter (but should have!). 

Desaturation

First we want to increase the con­trast and low­er the sat­u­ra­tion of the image. So let’s start by dupli­cat­ing the base lay­er (CTRL+J) and desat­u­rate it (CTRL+SHIFT+U). Feel free to select any method you like, I used Min.

Now bring up Curves Adjustment (CTRL+M) to increase the con­trast and squeeze them into an S shape.

Let’s also bring up the con­trast in the orig­i­nal lay­er. Hide the black and white one, and select the first lay­er. Apply the same curves adjustment.

Finally, enable the black and white lay­er again and low­er its opac­i­ty to around 50%

Now, let’s also add some film grain to give it a more vin­tage feel.

Add some film grain

There are two ways we can add film grain. The best one is to just grab a film grain scan. These are actu­al blank films, usu­al­ly 35mm or 8mm. You can find a cou­ple of film grain scans here. Just down­load the images and drop them as a new lay­er in Krita. Easy and real­is­tic. You can find more of them online, and there paid options too (most­ly for film makers).

If you don’t feel like down­load­ing, you can try using the noise fil­ter. This does­n’t look as real­is­tic but it does the trick. Start by adding a new lay­er and fill it with black. Now go to the Filter menu, and then Noise. Apply the effect with the default set­tings. Finally, change the blend­ing mode to Soft Light and low­er the opac­i­ty to about 15%.

Give it that Mayfair tint

Now it’s time to add that clas­sic warm tint. Add a new fil­ter lay­er and select gra­di­ent map. Change the col­ors to be vio­let (#1e1224) on one end, and orange (#dd6522) in the oth­er. Click OK and set the blend­ing mode of this lay­er to Soft Light. Lower the opac­i­ty to about 80%.

Complete with a Vignette

Let’s com­plete the effect with a vignette effect. In pho­tog­ra­phy, vignetting is a reduc­tion of an image’s bright­ness toward the periph­ery com­pared to the cen­ter. They are often added to an image to draw inter­est to the cen­ter and/or to frame the cen­ter por­tion of the photo.

You can use the Vignette effect from G’Mic (Filter > Start G’mic QT) which is a one-click solu­tion, but you would have to merge all lay­ers first. While mak­ing a vignette man­u­al­ly let’s you keep the lay­ers, in case you want to mod­i­fy them later.

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%

Did you make some­thing cool with this effect? Accidentally found anoth­er cool trick in Krita? Let me know in the comments!