Sepia was chemistry, not taste
Victorian photographs are brown because somebody was trying to stop them rotting.
A silver gelatin print is metallic silver suspended in gelatin, and metallic silver reacts with pollutants in the air and fades. Sepia toning converts that silver into silver sulphide, which is far more chemically stable and lasts a great deal longer. The brown colour was a side effect of the treatment.
Which produces a survivorship effect nobody intended: the prints that lasted long enough for us to see them are disproportionately the toned ones. Sepia looks like the past partly because the untoned photographs of the same era faded away.
Toning is a channel mix, not a brown layer
The obvious way to make a photo sepia is to lay brown over it. It looks wrong immediately and it is worth knowing why.
A brown overlay tints everything by the same amount, so the shadows get as much brown as the highlights and the picture goes flat and muddy. Toning is not an overlay: it maps each pixel through a matrix that lifts red, holds green and pulls blue down, in proportion to how bright the pixel already was.
So the highlights warm up, the midtones go properly brown, and the shadows stay dark instead of turning into mud. That is the difference between a print and a stain.
Age fades, it does not crunch
This is the mistake almost every vintage filter makes, and correcting it does more than any amount of grain.
A photograph that has spent forty years in a frame in daylight has faded. The blacks have lifted towards grey, the whites have dulled down towards cream, and the tonal range has narrowed from both ends. It has less contrast than the day it was printed.
Vintage filters overwhelmingly add contrast, because contrast makes an image look punchier and punchy tests well. It is exactly backwards. If you want something to read as genuinely old, take contrast away, then tone it. The "faded photo" preset here does that and it is the one most people end up on.
Grain, and why it is not noise
Film grain is clumps of silver halide crystals. It is monochrome, it sits on brightness, and it has a texture the eye reads as photographic.
Digital noise is coloured speckle produced by a sensor working in poor light, and nobody has ever wanted more of it. Adding coloured noise to a photograph in the name of a film look makes it look like a bad photograph rather than an old one.
The grain here is monochrome for that reason. It is also seeded, so the same photo and the same settings give you the same grain twice: random grain that regenerates on every preview makes it impossible to judge anything, because the picture changes while you are looking at it.
Vignette, gently
Real lens vignetting is light falling off towards the corners because less light reaches the edge of the frame. It is a gentle, quadratic falloff and mostly you are not supposed to see it.
This one falls off with the square of the distance from the centre, so the middle stays clean and the corners do the work, rather than the hard circular gradient that makes so many filtered photos look like they were taken through a tube.
Past about 40 it stops being subtle and becomes a decision. That is a legitimate look. It is just no longer pretending to be a lens.
No watermark, ever
The export is the picture. No badge in the corner, no name across it, no reduced resolution and no account to remove any of that, because there is nothing to remove.
It runs on your device, so there is no server cost to recover and no reason to hold the good version back.
Common questions
Why were old photographs brown?
Not for the look. Sepia toning was a chemical process that replaced the metallic silver in a print with silver sulphide, which is far more stable. It was done to stop prints fading, and the brown colour was a side effect. The reason so many surviving Victorian photographs are sepia is partly that the toned ones are the ones that survived.
Is sepia the same as a brown filter over the photo?
No, and that is why a lot of sepia effects look like a stain rather than a print. A brown overlay tints the shadows as much as the highlights and everything goes muddy. Proper sepia is a channel mix: it maps each pixel through a matrix that pushes red up and blue down in proportion to brightness, so highlights warm and shadows stay dark.
How do I make a photo look genuinely old rather than filtered?
Lower the contrast rather than raising it. Real ageing fades prints: the blacks lift towards grey and the whites dull down, so the range narrows. Almost every "vintage" filter does the opposite and adds contrast, which is what makes them read as an effect. Fade first, tone second, grain and vignette last and lightly.
What is the difference between grain and noise?
Grain is monochrome and comes from the silver crystals in film, so it sits on brightness alone and generally looks pleasant. Digital noise is coloured speckle from the sensor and generally does not. The grain here is monochrome for that reason, and it is seeded so the same settings give the same result rather than shimmering on every redraw.
Why does the vignette look fake when I turn it up?
Because a real lens vignette is a gentle falloff that you are not supposed to notice, and most tools apply a hard circular gradient you cannot miss. This one falls off with the square of the distance so the centre stays clean and the corners do the work, but past about 40 it will still read as deliberate. That is a legitimate look, just not a subtle one.
Is a copy of the picture kept anywhere?
No. Everything happens in your browser and no file is sent anywhere. There is no account and no size limit beyond your own device.