Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of photos on blogs that have a Polaroid look to them. The Polaroid look seems to be back in style. Ironically I heard that just a couple of years ago Polaroid closed their last factory where Polaroid film was still produced. Just a tad too early. They should have waited just a little bit longer because everybody knows that everything comes back in style again after 20 or 30 years…

Anyway. To get that Polaroid look one could go on ebay to look for an old Polaroid camera and film. With some Photoshop talent you could also get pretty close, although it might take a while to find just the right look. A while ago I found a solution that I really like: a virtual Polaroid camera. On poladroid.net you can download free software that changes your photos in such a way that it looks like they were made with an old Polaroid camera. Including an authentic looking edge and, if you want, fingerprints and scratches. The program is real easy to use and looks very good. Definitely worth your time to give it a try.

The nice thing about this piece of software is that it can be usefull as well as fun. You can use it to process photos of which the quality is not perfect. The other day I had some photos that had a little bit too much noise and also some difficult color casts. Normally I would have kept these photos to myself but after have Poladroided the photos, it was OK that the quality wasn’t perfect.