Decided to play around with some old-timey effects again. Me and a friend were looking through the Raristocrat tag and we saw someone did one just by making it black and white, so I decided to show him some neat tricks I’d learned just using GIMP.
 
Desaturate, noise, then you play with the color curves (all 3 at once) to mimick the effect of old cameras having a rather narrow exposure range - where shadowed areas get very dark, and bright areas get very bright.
 
All credit to the original artist for this fantastic piece, though I’m somewhat proud of how well the edit turned out looking in terms of recreating the “old-timey” effect.
 
It’s a really, really neat reminder, IMO, of how MLP is taking place in a 1910’s-ish setting (no automobiles, but x-rays in hospitals, propeller-driven airships, skyscrapers in Manehatten and relatively modern culture - certainly closer to modern than 1800 culture, at least). When you suddenly realize that, it brings on a really amazing appreciation of understanding our ancestors and the lives they lived - if not a somewhat chilling reminder that one day our current lives will be considered ancient history. Though personally I like to think more of how it brings the past to life and helps you realize we’re not so different from our great-great-grandparents, after all. Helps make the past seem a lot more relatable.
 
Original image: