I was one of the people that lamented the obvious death of film when it became clear years ago that digital would eat its lunch. Don’t get me wrong – I got on the digital bandwagon as soon as I could afford it, but it makes me a little sad to not visit the darkroom here and there.
I’ve gotta say it though – an unused film camera doesn’t do anyone any good. Having taken pictures with the Rollei and TtV with my digital camera, I know which one I’m more likely to pick up again in the future. I guess I’m not the only one who enjoys simulations of old tech.
Wanna fake your own Polaroid prints for (some amount of) fun and (absolutely no) profit? Hit the jump for more.
Enter Poladroid. Recently available (free!) for Windows, the Mac version has been floating around for a while already. I’ve got to say it – it’s a lot of fun. You do have to deal with a few conceits however. The program acts just like a Polaroid camera. It makes the same noise. It gives things a cool color cast and throws a little vignetting around the outside. If you go into the settings, you can make it smear some crap on the prints. It even takes a while for the pictures to develop – a real pain in the ass if you ask me, but I suppose somewhat offset by the fact that you can save pictures during the development process if you for some reason decided you needed a half-developed fake Polaroid. In the end though, I can’t complain – the effect is fun and printed out, I bet the fakes would be pretty convincing from a few feet away.
Download it yourself (using IE, of course, since for some reason Firefox doesn’t play happy with their server).
Subscribe to my
I like it. Does it have batching? I assume you start with “square” images?
[...] requires Adobe Air, also a free download) and run it on your computer. Totally reminds me of the Poladroid app from a while back. There are only a few things to [...]
If you don’t start with square, it crops. And it doesn’t seem to even pick the largest square, it just… does what it does. It won’t formally batch. The workflow is just dragging files onto the Poladroid camera, and they kinda spit out as they’re ready. You can drag a bunch and I assume they’ll come out one after another. I have to say though – it would be pretty nice if you could turn off the development delay. I find myself dragging pictures and then going somewhere. I know it would take away some of the Polaroid mystique, but um… it’s already not a real camera…