How to get the vintage film look on an iPhone
"Vintage" covers about forty years of wildly different looks. Deciding which one you mean is most of the work, because the seventies and the nineties are not remotely the same photograph.
Seventies: warm, soft, low contrast
Early instant film was slow and gentle. Expect muted colour, a heavy warm cast, soft edges and shadows that lift rather than going black. Skin looks flattering and detail is scarce. If you picture a faded family album, this is it.
Eighties: saturated and punchy
Faster, more contrasted film with strong colour. Blues and reds jump. Grain is obvious but tight. This is the look of a party photograph taken with a flash, and it is the one most people actually mean by "retro".
Nineties: neutral, with a date in the corner
Consumer film got genuinely good. Colour is close to accurate, contrast is moderate, grain is fine. What dates these pictures is not the film at all: it is the orange databack stamp and the squarish point-and-shoot framing.
Faded: any era, plus time
Prints left in sunlight lose their dyes at different rates, so they drift toward magenta or cyan while contrast collapses. This is not a film stock, it is damage, which is why it reads as genuinely old rather than merely old-fashioned.
Matching the look
Instant Film Maxx ships a stock for each: SX-70 for the seventies, 600 for the eighties, Golden for warm sunlit frames, Vintage for aged prints and Fade for sun-bleached ones. Because the stock is applied live in the viewfinder, you pick the era before the shot rather than trying to rescue it afterwards.
Instant Film Maxx is an instant film camera for iPhone. Shoot, shake, and watch the picture come up. Get it on the App Store.