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A square 70s colour print of you

By 1970 the family snapshot was a colour print: square, white-bordered, warm and a little soft. Pick a photo and the year, and Erafy makes a new 70s picture in that form with AI.

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AI photo app · Free to download · iPhone · 18+

Faded 1970s colour photo of a woman in a floral blouse on a sunny street

Nobody in the examples is a real person — the before photos are invented faces. These are our best results, not average ones. Sometimes AI can't handle it and modifies your face. All we can offer is a try.

What a 1970s colour print looked like

The camera of 1970 took a drop-in film cartridge: a fixed lens, one exposure, a square frame, and a cube of four flashbulbs clipped on top for indoors. Colour had overtaken black and white. The drugstore returned square prints about three and a half inches across, white-bordered, often with rounded corners: warm, a little muddy, grainy, with a yellow-green cast, sharp in the middle and soft at the edges.

The flash cube made the indoor look of the decade: a bright face, strong red-eye, a hard shadow behind, and anything past nine feet gone black. Slides went into a slide projector, deeper and sharper. An instant camera pulled out a peel-apart print, warm, soft and pastel. No orange date in the corner yet: that came late in the decade.

For each 1970s picture Erafy picks from that list at random: a cartridge print in sun or by flash cube, a 35 mm frame, a slide, a black-and-white print, or an instant. The prints carry their age, drifted toward amber with the cyan gone from the shadows; slides have mostly kept their colour. Turn Situation on and the scene might be a backyard barbecue by an above-ground pool, an avocado-green kitchen, or a road-trip stop beside the station wagon.

Autofocus and 35 mm film came next, in the 1980s.

More from the 70s

  • A faded 1970s colour photo of a woman in a crochet shawl in a wildflower meadow with a guitar
    Meadow
  • A 1970s wedding photo: a lace gown and a maroon suit with a big bow tie
    Couple · Wedding
  • A black-and-white 1970s photo of a couple at a backyard barbecue, the man in an apron holding tongs over the grill
    Backyard barbecue

Other years

  • Sepia 1900 portrait of a woman in a high-collared blouse on a city street with horse carriages
    1900Early roll film, black and white
  • 1910 early colour photograph of a woman in a lace blouse seated at a garden table
    1910Glass plates, film packs and early colour plates
  • Black-and-white 1920s street portrait of a woman in a pale dress and a long pearl necklace
    1920Orthochromatic black and white
  • Sepia 1930s street photo of a woman in a floral dress holding a handbag
    1930Roll-film snapshots
  • Black-and-white 1940s street portrait of a woman in a tailored jacket
    1940Wartime black and white
  • Black-and-white 1950s street portrait of a woman in a cardigan and plaid skirt
    1950Black and white, and the first colour
  • Black-and-white 1960s street photo of a woman in a gingham sundress beside parked cars
    1960Colour slides and black and white
  • 1980s colour snapshot of a woman in a striped sweater in a bedroom with posters and a TV
    198035 mm colour, pocket cameras, flash
  • 1990s colour film photo of a woman in a green sweater and jeans on a campus street
    1990Drugstore colour film and disposables
  • 2000 colour snapshot with a date stamp: a woman in a lilac T-shirt on a campus walkway
    2000Date stamps and the first digital cameras
  • 2010 phone photo with a heavy vignette: a woman sitting by a city waterfront
    2010Early phone cameras
  • 2013 filtered phone selfie of a woman by a stone arch in a city park
    2013Retro filter apps
  • 2016 phone photo of a woman at a café table with a latte
    2016Phone portrait mode
  • 2019 phone photo of a woman on a beach at sunset
    2019Night mode and ultrawide
  • 2022 phone photo of a woman at a café with a latte
    2022The modern phone camera
  • 2025 phone photo of a woman at a café table with latte art
    2025Today's phones

Questions

Why do 1970s photos look so orange?

Two reasons. The colour print film of 1970 already leaned warm, with a yellow-green cast and low contrast, and the fixed-exposure cartridge cameras under-exposed anything but bright sun, which left the prints muddy. Then the dyes faded. Over fifty years those prints have drifted unevenly toward amber and magenta-orange, lost cyan in the shadows and yellowed in the pale areas. Most slides from the same years have held their colour far better.

Did photos in 1970 have a date stamp?

No. The orange date burnt into the corner of the picture arrived late in the 1970s, stayed rare through the early 1980s, and only became common in the 1990s. A print from 1970 might carry a processor's date on the back or in the white border, but nothing inside the image.

What would I look like in the 70s?

Erafy makes a new picture from your photo in the style of the year you pick, so how much it resembles you varies from one go to the next. It varies most in the black-and-white years and in the crafts before 1900, where faces are drawn in the craft's style. We make no promise about how any result will look.

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