Vintage effect in the compositor

Making a trendy vin­tage effect in Blender is eas­i­er than you think. We can get some great results with just a cou­ple of nodes.

Jump into the com­pos­i­tor and acti­vate it (click “use nodes”). Use the Render Layers input node, or add an Image or Movie Clip node. Let’s add a “Hue Saturation Value” node and low­er the sat­u­ra­tion to about 0.5. Note that the val­ues I’m giv­ing here are in ball­park, you’ll want to tweak them to your images.

Add a Mix node and plug the result of the pre­vi­ous node into it. Set it to dif­fer­ence, choose a high­ly sat­u­rat­ed col­or for the sec­ond image input and low­er the fac­tor to about 0.1 or 0.03. This will give you a quick col­or cast.

From here on you can add a col­or bal­ance or RGB curves node to fine tune col­ors and get some con­trast back. Personally I like to use the Hue Correct node.