Affinity Photo - Vintage Cabinet Card Tutorial

Hello and welcome to this Affinity Photo tutorial to make a vintage

cabinet card from one of your images. As you can see from the image
on the right I have done just that with an image of myself.

A brief description of what a cabinet card is from Wikipedia - The cabinet

card was a style of photograph which was widely used for photographic portraiture
after 1870. It consisted of a thin photograph mounted on a card typically measuring
108 by 165 mm (41⁄4 by 61⁄2 inches).

They will most likely work better if you have an image with a plain
background, unlike my one with trees in the background. Which is why
for this tutorial I am going to use one from the Unsplash Stock panel
found in all Affinity software.

Below I will add links to items used in this tutorial

Frame - h�ps://knicko�ime.net/2014/09/an�que-photos-cabinet-card.html

Texture - h�p://www.textures4photoshop.com/tex/abstract/seamless-texture-
dust-and-scratch-free.aspx

So, to start the tutorial, you’ll need a cabinet Next, I opened a new pixel layer. Moved it so it
frame. I did a quick search and didn’t find too was under the frame and text layers and then
many free ones but the one linked above is free flood filled the layer with a darker sepia colour
and comes in PNG format. If you find a non- that the frame itself. You can select your own
PNG image you will have to alter blend modes colour but I used Hex C8AE6E.
to get your image to work.
I then selected my portrait
So the frame from Knick Of image and pasted it between
Time website comes with its the fill background and the
own written tutorial (Photoshop) frame layer. Resize and
which you could adapt and position inside the frame how
follow if you prefer. you want it to look.

Right click on frame image and If you are using a black and
‘Save As’ in the PNG format. white image, skip this bit.
Once you have downloaded
and opened the file in Affinity Add a Black and White
Photo, you will see that as its a adjustment layer to you
PNG you can see that any background or image portrait image layer, tinker with
file you place inside the frame will be visible setting to your tastes. Drag adjustment layer
outside the frame, plus the frame isn’t straight. down and into the portrait layer, so it will only
affect that layer.
So, what I did was select the Crop Tool and
slightly rotate the frame so it was straight. Then Click and highlight the portrait layer and change
brought the crop edges into the frame as close Blend Mode.
as possible. This just left the rounded corners to
sort out. I selected the In-Painting Tool, set I used Hard Light but Overlay
brush size quite small and painted over each and Soft Light may suit your
corner to fill in the corners and image better. I then lowered
make them square. the layers opacity to about
45% to allow some of the
I then selected the Text Tool to sepia layer bellow to show
add my fictional company name. through.

I made font colour a darker You can always reopen the

sepia colour and also added Black and White adjustment
some noise to that colour to give and tinker with settings to get
it a more aged look to it. better results.
Next, select and highlight the portrait image
layer. Then add a Layer Mask by clicking on the
icon in the layers panel that looks a bit like the
Japanese flag.

This layer mask will be white and the mask will

now be the layer highlighted. Press Ctrl+i or
Command+i to invert the layer and make the
mask black. This will hide the image layer from
view.

Then select the Brush

Tool, select round basic
brush head, set to white,
hardness set to zero and
opacity set to about 20%.

Then paint in the middle of

the portrait bringing back
the face (mainly) and not
going into the corners, to
give a vignette effect.

Now what we need to do

now is add a bit of ageing
to the image, with some
texture and scratches.

There are many places on the Internet where

you can get textures. Some with no
backgrounds (PNG’s) or some with white or
black backgrounds (JPG). What version you use
will need a different blend mode to get the best
affect, so experiment with opacity and blend
modes. Like all tutorials the settings like colours, blend
modes and opacity are just guide lines. They
The one I am going to use is a jpg, that is black are setting I like for this image. But you may
background with white dots and scratches. prefer different settings for your image and
Highlight the portrait image layer and Copy and tastes.
Paste your texture. Then change the texture
layers blend mode and if desired opacity. I used Don’t be afraid to experiment and get the look
Screen blend mode and 40% opacity. You could you want.
also move and resize the texture layer to get
different scratch effects.

The project could be saved now and you’d have

a pretty good cabinet card. Or you could add
one more adjustment layer above the scratches
layer. A Gradient Map adjustment.

By default the Gradient Map opens up with 3

colours set. Remove the centre node and alter
the other 2 nodes to dark violet on left node and
dark red on right node. Below are the hex codes
I used, but you can use your own choices.

Right red - 5D0505 Left violet - 3F0564

Then alter its blend mode to Soft Light and

lower opacity to about 30%-35%

That is the end of the tutorial. Just save/export

image with new name.