Turn a Selfie into a Retro Yearbook Portrait

1997, and the giveaway is the hair light.

Studios that year put a hard lamp high behind the subject, which is why everyone's crown glows and their shoulders fall into shadow. I rebuilt that first, then let the film do the rest: grain you can count, highlights on the forehead that roll off before they resolve, and a print that has drifted a little toward magenta the way these prints always did.

The backdrop is the blue-grey gradient every school ordered from the same catalog. I kept the canvas texture visible at the edges, and left one speck of scan dust near the lower corner — the kind you only notice years later.

The smile is deliberately incomplete. Nobody in a 1997 yearbook is fully committed to the photo.

• You could also: move to 2003 and the hard hair light disappears, the hair layers out, and the whole frame cools by about 400K.