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Pinhole Camera Effect

Hand it a photograph and it takes the picture again through a pinhole — no lens, so nothing is ever truly sharp and nothing is ever more blurred than anything else, with the corners falling away because of simple geometry. Two fields.

bring a photographicsstillphoto-inprocessimage-promptminutes
ExamplesOne photograph in · one pinhole exposure out · equally soft everywhere
in
Church across a field
in
Figure in a doorway

We made two examples, from two different photographs: a church across a field, where the far thing is the subject, and a figure in a doorway, where the near thing is. Together they show whether any distance comes out sharper than the rest.

You get the photo retaken as if through a pinhole, with no lens: nothing is fully sharp, and near and far things are close to equally soft, though not quite equal. Light falls off gently towards the edges across most of the frame. The extreme corners can darken suddenly; if that bothers you, crop them.

Generated for this library

Input
  Hole        small - the window frames are still readable
              as frames, but no edge in the picture is
              crisp
  Exposure    long enough that the people who walked
              through the churchyard are not there at all
  Photograph  church.png (1254 x 1254)

Returned   1 image · 1:1 · the church through a hole

softness   nothing in the frame is crisp
evenness   much closer than a photograph: the near
           grass carries 8.9 times the detail of the
           far church in the source and 3.4 times in
           the result - closer to equal, not equal
falloff    smooth and circular over most of the frame
           after a rewrite, but the extreme corner
           still drops away all at once
movement   nobody in the churchyard, as asked
words      none, in any script
SKILL.mdthe whole thing, as you would paste it© vibary.ai

You fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.

  1. 1How big the hole is, said as how soft the sharpest thing gets
  2. 2How long the exposure ran, said as what has left the picture

Pinhole Camera Effect

What this makes

Hand it a photograph and it takes the picture again through a pinhole — no lens, so nothing is ever truly sharp and nothing is ever more blurred than anything else, with the corners falling away because of simple geometry. Two fields.

The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.

How to use it

  1. Copy the whole template with the button above.
  2. Attach the photograph and paste the template in the same message.
  3. Replace the two FIELDS lines. Set the softness against a named thing in the picture rather than as an adjective.
  4. Compare a near edge with a far edge. They should be equally soft. If the far one is softer, the run used a lens.
  5. Check the corner falloff is circular and centred. An oval or a rectangular darkening is a vignette filter, not geometry.

What you swap

How big the hole is, said as how soft the sharpest thing gets
a small hole — the window frames are still readable as frames, but no edge in the picture is crisp
How long the exposure ran, said as what has left the picture
long enough that the people who walked through the churchyard are not there at all

Before it runs

  • A photograph, attached to the message. This re-photographs a particular scene, so there has to be a picture of it.
  • A subject that survives softness. Anything whose point is fine detail — a face's expression, small lettering, a texture — will not come through, because nothing in a pinhole picture is sharp.
  • Something at more than one distance. The strangeness of a pinhole is that the near thing and the far thing are equally soft, and a picture with only one distance in it cannot show that.
  • A still subject, or an acceptance that moving things vanish. A minutes-long exposure removes people and traffic entirely.

When to reach for it

When a picture should look older and stranger than a camera makes it: a cover, a title card, a print, a piece of packaging. Templates in this genre ask for a pinhole or lomo look and hand back a sharp photograph with a vignette and some blur at the edges, which is a lens pretending to be a hole.

What changes

  • One photograph in, one pinhole exposure out — the same scene, made without a lens.
  • Everything is equally soft at every distance, because a hole has no plane of focus to be on or off.
  • The corners darken by geometry rather than by a filter, so the falloff is smooth, circular and centred.
  • The exposure runs to minutes, so anything that moved has thinned or gone and the sky has drawn out.
  • One image, no light leaks, no grain overlay, no film border.

Pairs with