worn out...

can anyone explain how to make worn/faded markings like the ones in this picture, or possibly point me in the right direction?

It looks like they did some noise then blurred/sharpened it till it looked that way.

put you some white/light gray objects or pantbrush strokes on a layer above the image and use the "dissolve" blend mode on that layer.

blur it a little... and you have something pretty near that.

the main object in the image was rendered in Infini-D. the orange background started out as a normal photo, but was gaussian blurred by at least 50. another photo was blurred a lot and placed on top of the other layers, set to overlay/soft light/hard light (one of them), to give the image a weathered, stained look. i then selected all, copied merged, and pasted into a new document. i changed it to grayscale, then set it to bitmap (something like 360 dpi, halftone screen, circle pattern, 20-30 lines per inch). it was converted back to grayscale, scaled back down to its original size, and copied into the original document. it was placed on top, set to darken (maybe), and set to a low opacity. the scratches are from a scan of packing tape, ripped off of a cardboard box. i selected chunks from the scan and pasted them into a channel, then selected the channel, created a new layer, and filled the selection with white. after all of the scratches were added, i merged the scratch layers, created a new layer on top of it (grouped with the scratch layer, so the new layer would only affect the scratches). in the new layer i added some noise... a relatively low number. no more than 10%, uniform. one more layer, still grouped, of a light tan color, set to color mode, to give the white scratches some color.

i think that's it.

Frank (if it's alright call you that), thank you so much for explaining it too me! I was killing myself for, like, 10 hours straight trying to come up with something close to what you did with the packing tape. It didn't really dawn on me, until I was exhausted, that it could have been scanned.

I love your stuff (websites/designs)! Thanks for the insight!

John