For iPhone · Available on the App Store
A Camera of the Nineteenth Century
Twelve authentic historic photographic processes, faithfully simulated through the mathematics of tone, grain, paper, metal, and light. Photography as it was first practised — now for iPhone and iPad.
The Twelve Processes
1839
The first commercially successful photograph. A mirror-like silver surface with extraordinary detail and a luminous quality that painters of the era envied.
1853
The photograph of the working class. Robust and immediate, now with regular or square plate format and optional worn borders for a cleaner or more distressed finish.
1850s
Egg-white paper prints mounted as cabinet cards. Warm sepia-brown tone, aged cream stock, rounded corners, fine speckling, and a ruled inner border.
1840s
The warm brown tone of silver sulphide — the process that preserved Victorian portraits through a century and a half.
1842
Sir John Herschel's iron-based process. Deep Prussian blue. The print that gave us the word "blueprint," beloved by Anna Atkins, the first to publish a book of photographs.
1839
Made from crushed plant pigments exposed to sunlight. Delicate, fugitive, botanical. The most poetic of all photographic processes.
1873
The process of choice for fine art portraiture. Cool, shadow-rich, with a tonal range that silver could never match. Built to last a thousand years.
1907
The Lumière brothers' starch-grain colour process — dreamy, pointillist, the first practical colour photography available to the public.
1851
Frederick Scott Archer's collodion process — the dominant medium of the mid-nineteenth century. Cracked emulsion, silver bubbles, edge melt, and amber-olive toning of a damaged plate.
1907
Oil-based ink applied by hand to a bleached gelatin matrix. Painterly, stippled, with inky shadows and pale milky highlights — no two prints alike.
1891
Gabriel Lippmann's Nobel Prize-winning interferential process — the only direct colour photography. Warm amber ageing, long-exposure softness, and glass plate scratches from 130 years of handling.
1930s
Light beyond the visible spectrum. Glowing pale foliage, darkened skies, spectral skin tones, and the strange hush of infrared-sensitive film.
Features
Gaslight Octagon, Parlor Cartouche, Cameo Round, Velvet Reliquary, Aurelian Cameo, Midnight Locket, Salon Window — or No Frame. The picker appears directly in the viewfinder top bar.
Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, black point, saturation, vibrance, warmth, sharpness, and vignette — with real-time live preview as you drag, and one-tap Auto enhancement.
Swipe through every process side by side, or compare against the original photograph.
Precision crop handles with a rule-of-thirds grid. Apply in seconds.
Ultrawide (0.5×), wide (1×), 2× and telephoto (5×) — native-style buttons in the viewfinder let you switch instantly between every lens your iPhone has.
From a subtle whisper of the past to a full period rendering — you control the depth of the effect.
Albumen renders the photo as a warm paper print mounted on aged cream card stock, with rounded corners, fine paper texture, and a ruled inner border.
A spectral black-and-white process with luminous foliage, dark skies, and the otherworldly tonal separation of infrared-sensitive emulsions.
Portrait and landscape throughout — landscape shows a side-panel edit layout keeping the image large while all controls remain accessible.
Shoot once, save many. Swipe to a different process and save again — each version saved independently to your library from a single capture.
The period effect — vignette, plate edges, borders — wraps precisely around your cropped composition. A Daguerreotype that fits exactly what you framed.
Photography is, at its heart, the capture of ancient light — photons that have travelled from the sun, reflected from the world, and fallen onto a surface sensitive enough to remember them.
Ancient Light · v1.9
Common Questions
A daguerreotype is the first commercially successful photographic process, invented in 1839. It creates a mirror-like image on a silver-plated copper sheet with extraordinary detail and a luminous quality. Ancient Light authentically recreates this historic process, including period frames from the era.
No. Ancient Light is a one-time purchase with no subscription required. All twelve historic photographic processes, full adjustment controls, Tintype options, Albumen cabinet-card output, Infrared, and period frames are included with your purchase.
Ancient Light includes twelve authentic processes from the 19th and early 20th centuries: Daguerreotype (1839), Tintype (1853), Albumen (1850s), Sepia (1840s), Cyanotype (1842), Anthotype (1839), Platinum (1873), Autochrome (1907), Wet Plate Collodion (1851), Bromoil (1907), Lippmann (1891), and Infrared (1930s).
Yes. Ancient Light works on both iPhone and iPad, with full support for portrait and landscape orientations. The iPad version features a side-panel edit layout that keeps your image large while maintaining easy access to all controls.
Cyanotype is an iron-based photographic process invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842, producing distinctive deep Prussian blue prints. It's the process that gave us the word "blueprint" and was famously used by botanist Anna Atkins to create the first book of photographs.
Absolutely. Ancient Light includes a full adjustment suite with controls for exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, warmth, and effect intensity — allowing you to create anything from a subtle whisper of the past to a full historic rendering.