Nothing impossible! Create a special experience with Retrica

Magic filters transform ordinary pictures 180 degrees.

We are living in a world where we buy time and experience with money. We pay to be locked in a room for the experience of making a dramatic escape or to visit a haunted house. Or we put on VR goggles to get to a far-away country on a train.

Yet there are experiences that you cannot have in your hands. You cannot have a retro scene of decades ago reenacted exactly as it was unless you travel back in time. You cannot take a picture now and turn it into a film photo straight away, either. Or you cannot take a picture against a wintery background in the summer nor can you reenact the wet atmosphere of a rainy day on a dry autumn day.

Now, I wonder if it is possible at all to create such an unlikely experience with my hands and capture it in a photo. I think that Retrica can do that. Why not create and possess intriguing pictures with Retrica’s filters using its special settings.

Denim – loveliness of a faded photo

Retrica’s Olden filter pack creates a warm and soft atmosphere that characterizes old pictures. Pictures age the minute you apply a filter from this package. An exposure changing the tone to a more natural one, noise sitting on the picture like dust flying around, and soft and faded color impressions make a photo look infinitely aged.

Denim, one of the filters contained in the Olden pack, is characterized by the endearing charm of a time-worn photo. I use this filter often for my travel photos because it adds a soft vintage feel to a realistic photo. You can make photos look as sentimental as a photo that you come across in the corner of a drawer. 

I took this photo in downtown Taipei last spring. Instead of the feel of a café with a common urban mood, the Starbucks building gives off an antique feel that can only be found in Taiwan, with a vivid pink bus driving by. Buildings in Taipei age faster due to the rainy and highly humid Taiwanese climate.

Denim is the right filter for emphasizing these characteristics of the city. The vintage layer over my pictures of the city in the raw gives more sentiment and warmth to my memories of the travel. I applied the Denim filter to take pictures of primary-color-based styles or a café with a retro concept throughout my travel around the city, and I got attractive and satisfactory results.

Screen – like a film out of Mom’s old album

I don’t know why we are so nostalgic about the old analog times when we are living in a digital age. All the time we carry a mobile phone camera with us that is easy and handy, but we choose to go the extra mile to take pictures with a film camera. Or we pick up a product with a retro design rather than a modern design at a store. It is also the case with filters. Retrica’s Screen filter captures an old-world ambience that you want to keep, creating the feel of a film photo that you have taken out of Mom’s old album.

As you can see in the left picture, the sky on a hot summer day was fine, with fantastic fleecy clouds. This photo recorded the weather and mood of the day, but the mood and temperature that I felt in my heart was a little different from what my eyes could see.

A distant memory, a dreamy feel, the pleasant surprise of finding time-worn films and photos in the attic…… The Screen filter produced a feel that was very close to what I really saw and felt on that day, with the blue sky stretching out before me.

47ag – Christmas on a midsummer day

You can change the seasonal look and feel of a picture, depending on how you use filters. The Mythic filter pack that I want to introduce is not exactly designed for changing the sense of season. This package creates a dreamy feel by forcing strong lights into parts of the frame. Varying degrees of highs and lows produce nine different color impressions with different appeals. Among the Mythic filters, 47ag clothes a photo taken on a bright mid-day with the subtle warmth of a winter day.

I took the picture above at the Jade Garden, which is located in Chuncheon City, Gangwon-do Province. The building came out vivid as it was built with red bricks and the picture was taken on a little cloudy spring day. This is one of the sites where a Korean drama from years ago, titled That Winter, the Wind Blows, was filmed. So, I wanted to replicate with Retrica the ambience of the TV show where most of the episodes took place in the winter, with misty cold-weather breaths in many scenes. The filter I chose for this purpose was 47ag. The slightly hot weather on that day is gone and replaced with a wintery feel as if a light drizzle of sleet was fluttering around, making the picture perfect for me.

If you can’t tell which filter is right for the picture that you are taking, why not slide the filters left or right on the viewfinder or photo to find the right one. There are no given rules in Retrica. It depends only on your eyes and senses to create unique and unusual ambiences!