Beyond Instagram: How to make digital photos look 100 years old
Strut Type is a new photo app for the iPhone designed to make your brand spankin’ new smartphone photos look like they were taken by a single plate camera at the turn of the 20th century.
It’s the perfect app for anyone who thinks that Instagram’s filters don’t add enough nostalgia. Strut Type, which is named for a type of folding camera, will digitally destroy your photos enough to make them look like they were taken in photography’s early days.
The app is currently only available for the iPhone and costs $1.99.
Like Instagram, it lets you put photos through a combination of filters to alter the color and the distressing.
“Moldy” and “damp” are two of your distressing options, and there are lots of variations of sepia and black and white.
You can also choose to add “accidental” lighting leaks in yellow, green, or purple, and you can pick decaying looking borders and frames.
It takes several steps to get from a 2012 freshly shot iPhone photo to a smeared, blurry, black and white photo with an Edwardian feel. And so while the app is fairly intuitive and easy to use, it’s not as speedy as Instagram’s insta-filtering system.
However, you can just hit “random,” like I did on the photo above, and Strut Type will choose its own filters to apply to the photo.
The one above turned a picture of three kids enjoying “Bob the Builder” on an iPad into what looks like the start of a creepy zombie movie, which makes me think this app would be perfect for creating a Halloween party invite.
Boo!
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