iLoveMacApps.com

Polaroids are probably the only form of film cameras that are still on the market. All have been taken over by digital. Polaroids are the funky pictures you take with a thick white boarder. As a result they are fun way to take a picture and instantly see what you have taken. It has a lot of shaking involved as your picture slowly develops. This polaroid effect has been taken into the digital age with Poladriod. The results are fun and surprising really good.

Can You Take My Picture?

The idea behind this program is to get a really vintage polaroid effect. Although you can do some post-processing in Photoshop, that can take quite a long time if you don’t have the necessary skills. This program will take your image and apply some effects. These include smudge marks on the paper, actual paper textures, as well as under and overexposing your image so it looks “vintage”.

Actually using this program is really simple. You drag and drop your images onto the program. This isn’t a normal program with toolbars etc, it is a small image. Once as you drag your image a small sound will play and your small polaroid image will display on screen. It will then slowly develop from the brown background to your image. Shaking the image will help speed up the process.

From the image above, the camera is your drop box, the image on the left is a fully exposed image (which would have a small red cross in the corner if you could see it). The image on the right is an image which is half way through exposure. When the program actually finishes exposing your image you will end up with something similar to the one below. Notice the details such as scratches and white parts on the image area. These are all random on each image you do. You get a unique image every time. The image is also a very high quality, 1300px x 1600px.

You can then use these images in your Photoshop work are print them out on photographic paper for that polaroid effect without the polaroid camera.

Conclusion

For a fun way to get the polaroid effect, Poladriod is a fun program to use. There is a couple of problems with this program. First it is in French, which makes the odd menu item look a bit funny. As well as this it is slow of actually developing your image. If you want a quick way of actually getting a file image out of this program you will have to wait a couple of minutes as it develops your image. Overall it is fun to use. It is also free which is a major bonus.

If you want to keep up with the latests post from iLoveMacApps I recommend you subscribe to the RSS Feed.