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To make a photo look like the backrooms, you need to nail four things at once: no people, flat fluorescent or jaundiced-yellow light, a dead-on wide-angle composition with nowhere to exit, and a desaturated grain-heavy edit that flattens everything into that signature mono-yellow pallor. Get all four right and almost any real room (childhood bedroom, school corridor, dead mall) will tip into that uncanny, half-remembered dread. This guide covers both the DIY route and the faster path via liminals.space.
4 photos · see 2 rooms free · no account · your photos aren't saved.
The backrooms aesthetic has a precise visual grammar that gets reproduced across thousands of posts. Understanding each rule lets you apply them deliberately, whether you're shooting somewhere new or editing a photo you already have.
This one is non-negotiable. The uncanny quality of liminal spaces comes precisely from the absence of people in places built for them. A room that's supposed to be full (a school hallway between classes, a mall food court) reads as eerie the moment it's empty. If there's anyone in your shot, the human brain snaps out of the reverie and anchors back to a normal photograph. Wait for the room to clear, shoot early in the morning, or use a long exposure to blur and ghost out anyone moving through frame. If you're editing an existing photo, modern AI removal tools can erase people reasonably well, though they'll struggle with complex backgrounds.
The signature backrooms light is flat, sourceless, and yellowish. It comes from overhead fluorescent tubes or incandescent panels with no directional shadows: no windows, no hard side-light, no drama. Real locations with this light: school hallways, office corridors, supermarket back rooms, hospital waiting areas, underground parking structures. If your space has windows, shoot at dusk or block them. If it has warm tungsten bulbs, they can work. Dial back the warmth slightly in editing so it reads less "cozy living room" and more "been-here-since-1987."
If you're shooting outdoors or in a daylit room, you can fake the fluorescent look in editing by crushing the highlights (flatten them to grey-yellow rather than white), pulling shadows up slightly so there are no true blacks, and desaturating blues and greens entirely while leaving a narrow yellow-brown band.
Classic backrooms compositions are almost always shot from the middle of the room, looking straight ahead down a corridor or toward a wall. The camera is chest height or lower, never high and looking down. This creates the feeling that you are inside the space, not observing it. The composition needs to suggest continuation: another hallway at the end, a door that leads somewhere else, a stairwell going down. The phrase that captures it best is "no exit in sight." Even if there technically is a door, it should look like it leads to more of the same.
Wide-angle lenses (or your phone's 0.5× ultra-wide) add the slight barrel distortion that stretches the room's edges away from center. This subtle fish-eye pull is baked into the aesthetic. It makes the space feel slightly wrong in geometry, like a room that doesn't quite follow the rules.
Authentic backrooms photographs have a narrow tonal range dominated by yellowed whites, tan carpets, and aged wallpaper in shades somewhere between manila envelope and old newspaper. In editing this means: desaturate everything, then add a yellow-green tint back in (a curves layer lifting the midtone green and red channels slightly). Aged wallpaper, worn beige carpet, yellowed ceiling tiles are props, but if your real location has them, lean in. If it has paint in any colour other than off-white, try desaturating it hard and warming it toward yellow in the hue/saturation panel.
The photos that circulated when the aesthetic first spread online had the compression artefacts and noise of an old digital camera or found footage. Replicating that in editing: add film grain generously (more than you think looks good), reduce overall contrast so the histogram doesn't touch the far ends, apply a very slight gaussian blur or reduce sharpening so edges are just fractionally soft. The effect should read as "a photo found on an old hard drive" rather than a modern, crisp image. VSCO presets in the A or F series, or Lightroom presets tagged "film emulation," get most of the way there; the key is not to oversaturate, which is the opposite of the aesthetic.
What rooms work best? Anywhere people gather but don't stay: school corridors, mall interiors, office floors, hospital corridors, indoor pools, parking structures, leisure centres, suburban basements. The specific texture of the carpet and ceiling matters more than the room type. Worn, institutional, beige, and repeating is the target.
Done right, most rooms will shift noticeably. The more the location already matches the aesthetic (institutional, beige, fluorescent, empty) the better the result. An ultra-modern glass office won't get you there. A 1990s school corridor will land perfectly with almost no editing.
The DIY method above is genuinely useful and will teach you a lot about why the aesthetic works. But it has real limits. Manual editing can shift the colour palette and flatten the contrast, but it can't change the architecture. If your childhood bedroom has modern furniture, a high ceiling, and sunlight streaming in, no Lightroom preset will make it read as the backrooms. The bones are wrong.
That's the problem liminals.space solves differently. Instead of filtering your photo, it rebuilds the space from your real photo as its backrooms version, keeping your actual layout and the spatial memory of the room, but replacing the materials, lighting, and atmosphere with the full backrooms grammar. Aged wallpaper where your paint was. Worn carpet where your laminate was. Fluorescent haze where your window was. The same room, in the aesthetic.
Upload 4 to 6 people-free photos of a real place you know. The AI works through each one. Your first two rooms come back free in lower resolution, enough to see whether the result carries the feeling you were after. If it does, a one-time payment unlocks the rest in full resolution, a 3D step-inside view you can navigate in your browser, a VHS-style video that plays the rooms like found footage, and a downloadable keepsake containing everything.
Nothing is stored. Your photos are used once for generation and then deleted. No account required.
The practical difference: the DIY route is free and educational but limited by what's actually in your photo. The liminals.space route takes any real place (even a bright, modern, well-furnished room) and returns its backrooms version because it's rebuilding, not filtering. For rooms you remember rather than rooms you can still walk into and reshoot, it's often the only option.
4 photos · see 2 rooms free · no account · your photos aren't saved.
keep reading
What are the backrooms? · Why liminal spaces feel nostalgic · What would my backrooms look like? · Backrooms from your photo · Childhood bedroom