Add Vintage Effects to Your Pictures Using XnRetro

Do you envy the people who use Photoshop and upload great looking pictures on Facebook with stunning vintage effects applied? Now you can also have the similar vintage or retro effects in your pictures without using an expensive program like Photoshop or a smartphone app like Instagram. You can use the freeware application XnRetro to apply dozens of color effects, light effects, frame borders effects, vignette effects and more. XnRetro can make your picture look like as if it was taken a hundred years ago.

You can download XnRetro from the XnView website. The download is around 22 megabytes. It is a portable application which means that you do not have to install anything on your system. Just download the ZIP file, extract the contents of the ZIP archive to a folder and run XnRetro.exe from there. You can also copy all the extracted contents to your USB key so that you can run it from any computer you want.

Using XnRetro is extremely easy. Just open a picture in XnRetro (by clicking on the Open button in the toolbar). Rest is as easy as clicking on the preset effects. There are four tabs at the bottom – Retro, Light, Vignette and Frame. Select one of these tabs and then click on any of the preset effects to apply it. The effects are applied to the main picture and you can see the preview immediately.

Add Vintage Effects to Your Pictures Using XnRetro

The Retro section has many preset effects that change the color, gamma, saturation and contrast automatically to give a vintage look. The Light section has many light overlays that can make your pictures look more stylish. The Vignette section has presets to apply different types of vignette effects making your picture look really old. The vignette effects are present in photographs made in 1920s and before mainly due to camera limitations. The Frame section adds a custom border to your picture. Other than the preset effects, you can also manually adjust the color balance, contrast, gamma, exposure levels etc., for the picture

If you are not satisfied with effects combination and want to start over then you can click on the Reset button in the toolbar. You can also rotate the image left or right from the toolbar. When you are done with the effects, you can either save the file or share it with your friends. XnRetro also has an in-built option to share your picture with friends through Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Tumblr, Imgur, YFrog and many more online image sharing services.

Add Vintage Effects to Your Pictures Using XnRetro

The XnRetro Windows application is designed by the same people who made the popular image viewer XnView. This free application allows you to add many combinations of vintage, light and frame effects to your pictures. The program offers more than 22 different retro effects which can be combined with many light overlays, vignette effects, photo frame effects to get very nice looking retro pictures.

You can download the free XnRetro software from http://www.xnview.com/en/xnretro/.