Questions
What actually makes a video look like VHS?
Several defects stacked together, not one filter. VHS stored colour at far lower resolution than brightness, so colour smears sideways and bleeds past edges. The tape's noise floor adds grain. Imperfect head tracking produces the bands of static that roll through the picture. The signal path softens fine detail and blooms the highlights. Tape removes the guesswork by giving you each of these as a separate control, so you can dial in one look instead of accepting a preset.
Why do VHS colours bleed sideways and not up and down?
Because the format compressed colour only along the horizontal scan line. VHS recorded brightness at reasonable quality but squeezed chroma into a much narrower bandwidth, around 0.4 MHz against roughly 3 MHz for luma. Since the picture is drawn line by line from left to right, that compression smears colour horizontally while vertical detail stays comparatively intact. It's the single most recognisable VHS artefact, and Tape exposes it as the chromatic bleed control.
What are scan lines?
The visible horizontal lines of a CRT image. Analogue television drew the picture as a series of lines with small gaps between them, and on an interlaced display only half the lines were refreshed at a time. On a modern flat panel nothing produces them naturally, so recreating them is part of making a digital image read as analogue, though real VHS on a real CRT showed them much more subtly than most filters suggest.
What causes tracking noise?
A misalignment between the spinning video heads and the tracks recorded on the tape. When they don't line up exactly, the head reads partly between two tracks and returns noise instead of picture, which appears as a band of static drifting vertically through the frame. VCRs had a tracking dial for exactly this reason. It gets worse with worn tape, which is why an old, heavily played cassette shows more of it.
Does adding VHS effects reduce my image quality?
It changes it deliberately rather than degrading it by accident, and the export keeps your original resolution, because Tape doesn't downscale. That said, the look is built from softening, noise and colour smear, so fine detail genuinely is reduced; that's the point of the aesthetic. If you want the effect for a thumbnail but the sharp version for print, save both.
Can I use the images commercially?
The output is yours. Tape claims no rights over anything you process and never receives your files in the first place. What matters is whether you had the right to use the source photo: an image you shot yourself is fine, while a stock photo or someone else's picture carries whatever licence it came with, and running it through an effect doesn't change that.
Is Tape actually free?
Yes. There's no tier, no watermark, and no limit on how many photos you process.
Does it work on phone photos?
Yes, any JPG, PNG, or WebP works, including phone photos straight out of your camera roll.
What resolution does the download come out at?
Tape processes and exports at your original image's full resolution, not a downscaled preview.
Can I get a different noise pattern without changing the settings?
Yes, the "New noise" button reshuffles the grain and tracking-band pattern while keeping every slider where
you left it.
