HOW TO CREATE THE CROSS-PROCESSED LOOK

1 Apply a preset effect

Open the image you want to apply the effect to. Click the Quick editing mode tab. Click the Effects icon at the bottom-right. A variety of preset effect thumbnails appear, which you can quickly apply. Click the Cross Process thumbnail to shift the colours and darken the contrast. Easy! Except this preset effect is really rather over the top – we can make a better one. Click Undo, and let’s do this manually.

2 Use an adjustment layer

Click the Expert editing mode tab. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation and click, then click OK. A Hue/Saturation adjustment layer appears, which lets us get our new look. The first step is to set the Channel drop-down menu to Blues. Drag the Hue slider to -48 – as you can see, above, this has turned the sky a greener shade of blue. Next, set the Cyan channel Hue to -25.

3 Boost the saturation

Now set the Channel menu to Yellows and set Saturation to +22. This has boosted the colour of the vegetation in the front and middle of the above shot. The colours actually now look a bit too garish, but we can produce more subtle colour shifts by setting the adjustment layer’s Opacity slider to 80%, which means the original image’s colours blend with the adjusted ones.

4 Increase the contrast

The final touch is to add the rich black shadows produced by the traditional cross-processing technique to our picture. First, choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels, then click OK. Click the black shadow input level slider and drag it to 21. Set the Channel menu to Red and drag the midtone slider to 1.32 – and that’s it. You could tweak these settings slightly, but this should give you the darkroom look.