VHS vs CRT Photo Effect: What’s the Difference?

A VHS effect imitates damage that happened while the image was being recorded and replayed on magnetic tape. A CRT effect imitates how a glass tube screen physically painted that image in front of you.

In practice, VHS is about degradation and CRT is about presentation. A VHS look takes information away: colour accuracy, resolution, edge definition. A CRT look adds a layer on top: lines, glow, curvature, a faint sense that you are looking at hardware rather than at a photo.

That is why the two effects fail in different ways. Push VHS too far and your photo becomes unreadable. Push CRT too far and your photo becomes a striped pattern. Knowing which one you actually want saves a lot of slider guessing.

VHS was a consumer tape format built around compromise. The luminance and colour signals were stored separately, colour was recorded at a much lower bandwidth than brightness, and every copy or rewind wore the tape down a little more. A convincing VHS photo effect recreates those specific compromises.

• Chroma smear and colour bleed — colour spilling sideways past the edges it belongs to, most obvious on reds and bright saturated areas.
• Tracking lines and dropouts — horizontal bands of noise or white streaks rolling through the frame where the tape and head lost contact.
• Genuine resolution loss — VHS resolved far less horizontal detail than any modern camera, so fine texture simply is not there.
• Tape wobble and jitter — slight horizontal instability that makes vertical edges look nervous.
• Camcorder furniture — timestamps, REC indicators and battery icons burned into the corner. These are not tape artifacts at all, but they read as VHS instantly.

Notice how much of that is about loss and instability. A VHS edit is convincing when it looks like the image survived something, not when it looks like a filter was placed neatly on top.

A cathode ray tube fired an electron beam at a phosphor coating, sweeping across the screen one line at a time. Everything we recognise as "retro screen" comes from that physical process.

• Scan lines — the visible gaps between the lines the beam drew, and the single most recognisable CRT signature.
• Phosphor glow — a soft bloom around bright areas, because lit phosphor spread light into its neighbours.
• Screen curvature — a gentle barrel bow, since the tube itself was curved glass.
• RGB misalignment — thin coloured fringes on high-contrast edges where the three colour beams never landed perfectly.
• Corner falloff — brightness fading toward the edges, plus a general feeling of a frame around the picture.

Unlike VHS, a CRT effect does not need to damage your subject. The underlying photo stays intact underneath; you are adding the screen it is being viewed on. That is why CRT looks tend to survive Instagram compression and small thumbnails much better.

If you want the step-by-step version of this, the vintage CRT effect guide walks through each control and recommended starting values.

The confusion is historical, not careless. Nobody watched a VHS tape on a flat panel: tapes were played through CRT televisions. Every memory of a rented movie or a family camcorder recording arrives bundled with scan lines and phosphor glow, because the tape and the tube were always experienced together.

So when someone asks for a "VHS filter", they are often describing the whole memory: soft washed colours seen through a glowing, curved screen. Splitting that memory into its two halves is useful because you can then choose how much of each you want.

There is also a practical reason to separate them. Tape degradation is destructive and hard to control, while the screen layer is additive and predictable. If you only have budget for one effect, the screen layer carries far more of the nostalgic signal per unit of damage.

DreamyGlow’s Vintage CRT effect deliberately targets the CRT screen look rather than a full VHS tape simulation. It builds the display side of the aesthetic: scan lines, phosphor-style glow, CRT colour shift and subtle screen curvature, with controls for intensity, scan line density and curvature.

What it does not do is emulate a tape transport. There are no generated tracking errors, no head-switching noise at the bottom of the frame, no dropout streaks and no camcorder timestamp overlays. If you specifically need those, you are looking for a dedicated VHS pipeline, not a CRT filter.

For most retro projects that limitation is not a problem, because the screen look is the part people recognise instantly. Raising intensity gives you a warmer, more degraded and more obviously analog result that reads as "old video" to most viewers, even though the mechanism is a screen rather than a tape.

Practical starting points: 40 to 60% intensity for portraits where the face still needs to read, 70 to 90% for bold social posts and music artwork, and 30 to 50% for interfaces, screenshots or anything containing text. You can compare it against the other looks on the effects overview if you are still deciding.