Alibony Lessons for Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, and Digital Photography

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Make an Instant Polaroid™-Like Image With Poladroid

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Design and Graphics

January 21, 2009

Remember those old Polaroid™ images that slid from the camera wet and dried from a muddy mess into a somewhat colorful image? You can recreate that look with one of your digital photos and the free Polaroid™ Image Maker program, Poladroid.

Before After

To create a Polaroid™-like image:

  1. Download and install the Poladroid program.
  2. Double-click the Poladroid icon on the desktop to open Poladroid.
  3. On a PC, open Windows Explorer and find the JPG file you want to use with Poladroid.

  4. Drag your image to the Poladroid icon. Poladroid starts to process your image. This will take many long seconds (just like the original!), and while the image is processing, you can watch it turning from muddy to clear on the desktop, accompanied by camera sounds. When the processing is completed, a chime sounds and a red swoosh appears on the image.

  5. Right-click on the red swoosh and select Show me the file on the Desktop. Windows Explorer opens. The file is saved as a JPG file under My Documents -> My Pictures with _pola appended to the original file name.

Tips

You can set some preferences for Poladroid. When the Poladroid program is open on the desktop, click the blue-and-white button to display a pop-up menu. Select Settings and change as desired; for example, you can change the default folder where Poladroid saves the result files.

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Updated on August 4, 2011