i promise she'll find this funny

December 3, 2009 12:43 PM

What do you call this kind of retro picture?

I'd like to create something like this for an upcoming 50th birthday surprise (featuring the birthday girl instead of the married couple). The theme of the party is "Like a good wine, she only gets better with age." I think it would be funny to 'emboss' the picture with gold writing, a la Olan Mills. I'd like to get some more ideas, but can't even figure out what to Google!

posted by kidsleepy to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

The photo-faded-out-at-the-edges part is called a vignette.

As for a general term for the type of picture, "nasty 70's kitsch novelty photograph"?
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 12:54 PM on December 3, 2009

Superimposed vignette?
posted by benzo8 at 12:55 PM on December 3, 2009

I saw this in my parents-in-law's wedding book (not that picture, but one of them superimposed over a picture of the church stained glass window or somesuch). Novelty superimposing is the phrase I'd use, and that part is easy. Gold embossing takes a bit more work / specialized tools (or a steady hand with a gold pen).

Are you looking for the gold edging on the picture, or the image in the middle? I think they are individual elements, and it could help you if you looked for them separately. Or are you looking for similar images of the whole dated image?
posted by filthy light thief at 1:15 PM on December 3, 2009

The picture in a brandy snifter was made fun of in this SNL skit w/ Alec Baldwin.
posted by now i'm piste at 1:15 PM on December 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I wouldn't do an actual embossing, but just do it in Photoshop. And I'm "looking for similar images of the whole dated image." The fact that it's a brandy snifter will probably help in my search, but now I wonder if I can find someone who did this with a wine glass (since that fits better with my theme).
posted by kidsleepy at 1:21 PM on December 3, 2009

Oh, and here's a post on the Blue that might give you ideas: http://www.metafilter.com/67819/Photos-of-regular-people-looking-extraordinarily-bad
posted by now i'm piste at 1:21 PM on December 3, 2009

For authenticity make sure you use the "70s brown and yellow" filter overlay in Photoshop. God the photos make it look like the world was drab then, don't they?
posted by caution live frogs at 2:22 PM on December 3, 2009

I have a Kodak handbook from 1980 that describes this technique as a double exposure using a matte box with negative and positive mattes; i.e. the first exposure would be made with a matte blocking out the little circle in the middle of the glass, and the second exposure would be made with a matte blocking out everything around the couple. If you want maximum authenticity you could use that technique, but it would no doubt be much easier to do in Photoshop.
posted by Dr. Send at 7:39 PM on December 3, 2009