Prints and paper: borders, toning and fading

The shape comes from the camera

Photos in STILL mode take their shape from the STYLE, not from the FORMAT button. Every style is cropped to the proportions its camera actually made: square for box cameras, twin-lens reflexes and many instant films, 3:2 for 35 mm, 4:3 and 5:4 for many roll-film and plate cameras, a long 3:1 for panoramic cartridge prints, and a circle for the very first roll-film snapshot cameras of the 1880s and 1890s, whose lens drew a round picture. The crop never stretches the image: it cuts the frame to shape.

Borders and formats

Card mount. Victorian portraits were printed on thin paper and glued to stiff card, often with a wider margin at the bottom where the studio's name went. The 1890s styles mostly arrive on a dark brown card, with a pale line around the picture.
White border. From the 1900s to the 1970s most snapshots came back from the chemist with a plain white margin. It protected the picture from thumbs.
Deckle edge. From the 1930s to the 1950s many labs trimmed prints with a scalloped cutter that imitated the rough edge of handmade paper.
Slide mount. A color transparency was framed in a card or plastic mount so it could go in a projector. You see the picture through a window with rounded corners.
Booth strip. A photo booth made four pictures in a row on one strip, a few seconds apart. The app's booth styles stack four copies of your shot on one tall print.
Instant frames. Peel-apart instant film came with a thin border. Integral instant film, the kind that develops in your hand, has the familiar thick bottom edge where the chemicals were stored. There are square, wide and mini versions across the 1940s to 2010s.
Rounded corners. Many 1980s minilab prints had their corners rounded off.
Later frames. The 1990s sticker booth, the 2000s photo app frame and the 2020s double-camera inset carry the borders of their own decades.

From the 1990s onwards most styles are borderless, because the picture stopped being printed and started living on a screen.

Paper

Paper is not smooth. Old prints have a fine texture you can see in the highlights, and some 1970s prints were made on a textured silk surface on purpose. The app adds a fixed paper texture to the printed styles, the same on every part of the print, because it belongs to the paper and not to the light. One 1910s style, Newspaper Halftone, goes further: its picture is made of a screen of dots, the way photographs were printed in newspapers.

Toning: sepia, cyanotype, platinum

A black-and-white print isn't always black and white. Its image color depended on the process and on what the darkroom did afterwards.

Sepia. Sepia toning converted the silver in a print into a brown compound. Besides the warm color it made the print last longer, which is one reason so many old family photos are brown.
Cyanotype. An iron-based process that prints in deep Prussian blue. It was cheap and simple, and engineers used it for copying drawings, which gave us the word "blueprint".
Platinum. Prints made with platinum instead of silver have a long, soft scale of greys, a matte surface and a neutral-to-warm tone. They don't silver or fade the way silver prints do.
Albumen and others. Albumen prints, made with egg white, have warm purple-brown tones. Many silver prints have a warm black. The app keeps each tone as the style's identity.

The app applies the tone as a duotone after the color response: the deepest shadows stay dark, the white stays the paper's white, and the mid-tones and shadows take the color.

What time does to a print

Fading. Dyes and silver weaken. The blacks rise towards a soft grey, slightly purplish in many old prints, and the whites lose their brilliance.
Yellowing. The highlights and the border turn cream, then yellow. Albumen prints and early color prints are especially prone to it.
Silvering. On old silver prints the silver slowly migrates to the surface and forms a metallic mirror in the shadows. Tilt a Victorian photo in the light and you may see it.
Damage. Scratches and dust from years in a shoebox.

The app ages the print after the border, so the yellowing and the wear reach the margin too. The styles that carry the most ageing are at position 10 on the STYLE dial in each decade from the 1890s to the 1980s: the faded albums, Yellowed Colour Print and the magenta-shifted prints of the 1960s and 1970s.

Light leaks

A camera that didn't quite close let light in from the edge, and it fogged the film in a warm orange glow from one corner. Cheap plastic cameras were famous for it. The app washes orange light in from the top right corner in Toy Camera Light Leak (1960s), Toy Medium-Format Camera (1980s), Retro Filter App (2000s) and Disposable Camera App (2020s).

The eight color casts

Some styles carry a color cast that came from the medium, the light or the years. It has a fixed strength, because it is part of the style's identity, and DEGREE doesn't change it.

Magenta. Many color prints of the 1960s and 1970s drift to magenta as their other dyes fade faster.
Warm amber. An overall golden warmth.
Red-orange. Daylight film shot under household bulbs, which give much warmer light than the sun.
Yellow stain. Whites that have yellowed with age.
Cross-processed yellow-green. Slide film developed in the chemistry meant for negatives: yellow-green highlights and cyan shadows.
Matte fade. Raised, milky blacks and softer color, the look of a print that has lost its depth.
Underwater cyan. Water absorbs red light first, so pictures taken below the surface turn blue-green.
Psychedelic hue. Every color turned a little around the color wheel and made more saturated, for the late-1960s poster palette.

Flash fall-off

A flashbulb or a small built-in flash lights what is near the camera and very little beyond it. The subject in the middle is bright, and the corners and the background drop into darkness. The app darkens the picture from the center outwards in the flash styles. It is a photo-only effect.

Date stamps

Some styles are defined by a date, like the orange date in the corner of a 1980s or 1990s compact. Those styles print a date even when DATE STAMP is off. Turn DATE STAMP on and your own choices for the stamp win. The date comes from the camera's clock, which you can set to any day with SET CLOCK.

The 12 MP cap

Every print, border and booth cells included, is capped at 12 megapixels. Large borders such as a card mount count towards that budget, so on a large print the picture inside them can come out a little smaller.