Phosphor Press
Retro screens & halftone print
Only for iPhone
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPhone. Not verified for macOS.
iPhone
Amber and green phosphor, ink on paper, and the hardware palettes that came before colour was cheap. Everything happens on your phone.
Phosphor Press turns a photograph into the kind of picture a machine would have shown you before it could show everything: a few tones, a visible grain, and hard pixel edges.
Not a filter laid over your photo. The picture is taken apart and rebuilt on a palette of two, four or sixteen colours, with the dithering that made those palettes bearable in the first place.
SCREENS AND PRINT
Paper — dark ink on warm paper, four tones. The one to start with.
Ink — the same, at two tones, for a woodcut edge.
Amber and Green Terminal — the monochrome monitors, at two levels or four.
Inked 256 — full colour under hard black outlines.
CGA 1984, CGA Outline, EGA Adventure — the hardware palettes, matched in a
perceptual colour space so four colours still look deliberate.
Mosaic — your photo's own colours in big square blocks.
CONTROLS THAT DO SOMETHING
Pixel size, from a coarse mosaic to a fine grain. Period screen modes keep their original non-square pixels, so 320x200 looks the way it did on a real monitor.
Outlines that follow shapes rather than brightness. The app segments the picture into regions and draws the boundaries between them, so a line closes around an object instead of breaking up wherever contrast dips.
Even lighting, which divides out the light in a scene so a surface split by a shadow stays one colour instead of becoming two objects.
Auto levels, contrast, saturation, flattening, and frame shapes from square to 16:9 with a manual crop.
WHAT IT IS GOOD AT
Strong shapes and clear contrast: architecture, landscapes, silhouettes, objects against a plain background, anything backlit. A photograph reduced to four tones keeps what a silhouette is made of.
It is honest about the rest. Fine texture — hair, foliage close up, crowds — is what these palettes have to throw away, and portraits are the hardest subject of all. Monochrome handles them better than the colour palettes do.
NOTHING LEAVES YOUR DEVICE
No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no server. The app works with the network switched off entirely. Your photos are read, converted and shown back to you, and they go somewhere else only when you save or share them yourself.
FREE, AND PRO
Every palette, every dither mode and every frame size are free, forever.
Phosphor Press Pro is a single one-time purchase. It removes the signature from exports, adds CRT effects — scanlines, phosphor glow, aperture grille, vignette — adaptive palettes picked from your own photo, exports up to eight times the pixel size, and your own saved presets, exportable to another device.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The developer, MICHAL ZAJIC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- MICHAL ZAJIC
- Size
- 18.8 MB
- Category
- Graphics & Design
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 15.0 or later. - iPod touch
Requires iOS 15.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Phosphor Press Pro $2.99
- Copyright
- © 2026 Michal Zajíc
