Camcorder filter.
VHS. MiniDV. Fisheye.

What a camcorder frame looks like.

A still taken from home video has a look you cannot get from a modern phone camera. MiniDV camcorders recorded small, low-resolution images that were soft by today’s standards, with colors that smeared slightly at edges. VHS tape added horizontal scanlines and a pronounced color bleed, where red and blue drift away from the shapes they belong to. Wide fisheye lenses stretched the frame into a bulge.

This tool simulates those three characters on your photo. MiniDV softens the image, adds a trace of chroma bleed and the REC and timecode text from a camcorder viewfinder. VHS pushes the bleed and scanlines much further and swaps the text for PLAY. Fisheye curves the frame outward from the center and darkens the corners like a lens vignette. Every effect has its own slider, so you can mix a gentle bend with soft focus or tape lines without the others.

These are visual approximations. Real tape artifacts come from motion, interlacing and tracking errors that a single frame cannot show, and a photo effect cannot reproduce them exactly. What you get is a convincing still, which is usually all that a caption or a collage needs. For the cleaner color of an early-2000s compact still camera, try the digicam filter instead.