Fakin' it: Poladroid

While we're on the polaroid kick...

I wasn't quite sure how to react when a friend of mine told me about Poladroid, a free program you can download that takes digital images and applies a magical mix of filters to pump out a polaroid-esque effect. You of course can never TRULY replicate the quality of a polaroid nor the experience using the real deal, but long after the film has expired and run out...Poladroid may be our only hope. I was curious, so I downloaded the program expecting the worst (a terrible hack of a filter that didn't come anywhere close to the real thing). Much to my delight, it works quite well (how could I have doubted you Virginie?). It's as easy as finding the desired photo on your computer and dragging the file into the little polaroid camera icon. Poladroid processes for a few seconds and then makes the familiar rolling gear sound the real machine makes. Now you've got a developing polaroid version of your digital file on your desktop slowly transforming. Once developed, it saves as a jpeg. So fun and easy and the resulting images are very close in color and quality to real polaroids.


I even tried to trick it by sending through a photo of a real polaroid, but it barely changed it...very clever poladroid, very clever.

A few more random pola-conversions: