Vintage Cam: Y2K, Film & CCD

Grain is not noise. It is the reason a film photo feels like something, and it is what this app is built around.

Most retro apps hand you one grain slider and call it film. This one gives you grain by amount and by size, so you can go from a fine tight structure to a coarse one you can read across the room. Beside it sit halation, the glow real film leaves around a bright edge, vignette for the corners, and a light leak for the end of the roll.

VINTAGE LOOKS, TWENTY THREE OF THEM

The shelf covers seven kinds of photography. Film stocks that run from a soft daily negative to a sun bleached seventies roll, a warm print, crisp greens, a toy camera and the amber hour. Two CCD looks from the early digital years, one that clips its whites and one that stays flat and turquoise. Y2K flash tones for a magenta night. Two instant looks, one bleached and warm, one cold and crushed. Three in mono, from true grain to hard noir to antique sepia. Four dreamy ones, milky, pink, frosted and pastel. And three plain digicam looks for when you want the photo and nothing else.

They are called DZ 000, DZ 400, SR 76, AZ 200, VX 100, BW 400, GL 65, MT 50, RS 90, VH 98, WM 160, EM 100, NR 32, SP 12, TY 35, FR 64, SU 80, DM 25, CD 220, CD 330, Y2K 99, IN 600 and IN 70, and every one of them tells you in a line what it does before you choose it.

A DARKROOM IN THIRTEEN TOOLS

Filter to change the camera after the shot. Adjust for exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. Colour on a temperature and tint pad, with white balance presets and a full picker when you want an exact shade. Grain by amount and size. Texture for halation, vignette and leaks. Glitch for channel split, torn slices, scanlines and signal bleed. Crop with ratios sized for Instagram, YouTube and stories. Rotate with quarter turns, mirror and a straightening dial fine enough for a tilted horizon. Frame for paper and a date stamp. Text in thirteen real typefaces. Stickers from a full emoji shelf. Sixteen shapes, filled or outlined, solid dashed or dotted. And a brush for drawing straight onto the picture.

THE CAMERA ITSELF

Focus by tapping, zoom by pinching, pick a focal length and set your exposure. Shift white balance by hand or take a preset for tungsten, daylight, cloudy or shade. Grid, timer and flash sit under your thumb.

Stack two frames into a double exposure. Bend one with a fisheye. Shoot a 3D wiggle and keep it as a GIF. Roll video with tape, Super 8, MiniDV or neon effects.

PRINTS WORTH KEEPING

Mount a picture on five kinds of paper, a wide instant border and a narrow one among them, and burn on a nostalgic date stamp in four faces, four colours and four formats, placed wherever you drag it. Shoot on an instant camera and the print arrives already bordered.

NOTHING GETS OVERWRITTEN

Photos land in your gallery, not in some separate library you have to keep in step. Every edit saves as a new file and leaves the original alone, so the same photo can be finished a different way next week. My Rolls files each shot under the camera that took it.