VSCO gives Android users a taste of the old with film conversions for photos

Is Instagram not playful enough for you? We totally get it, and apparently so does someone else, crafting an app that makes it possible to make retro images with more tweak-ability than ever before on Android.

Released this week for Android, “VSCO Cam” is an app that gives you more control of making retro images than even Instagram can offer, allowing you to run film-like processes over your images, crop them, and fiddle with a whole bunch of other settings, such as brightness, contrast, tint, saturation, shadow levels, and much more, creating an image that can be shared to social networks, or saved to your phone.

The application is created by VSCO, which is a company that specialises in film-to-digital conversion technology, making filters for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom that apply the film styles of Agfa, Fuji, Kodak, Ilford, and Polaroid films to images shot on any camera, effectively emulating the look and feel (complete with grain) of those film stocks.

In VSCO Cam, the company has applied some of this technology to a camera application and made it possible to run your smartphone-captured images through these filters, modifying the images and basically giving them similar vintage goodness to Instagram, but with more control over what you can do.

Think of it as Instagram plus plus plus.

VSCO Cam has actually been available on iOS for some time, but this week marks the first time the retro-inspired camera and processing app has appeared on Android, available on devices with Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” and above.

Using the app is a little different from what you would do with Instagram, and won’t be for everyone, allow you to either take photos from your gallery or directly from the camera, and run them through the various sections of the app, which are handled through icons that offer little to no explanation.

Once you start pressing on them, it will begin to make sense, but with a first time user, it may take some getting used to.

Regardless, Android owners with a recent device should be able to find VSCO Cam on the Google Play Store, while iPhone owners can see the app on Apple’s App Store.