Art & Inspiration Giving Your Car's (And Other) Photos A Vintage Look With Poladroid

I hope this isn't going too far O/T but in addition to an appreciation of traditional cars, there also seems to be a lot of interest in art and photography in these forums. Plus this little bit of software is tons o' fun and it's FREE. So I figure, what's not to like.

Polaroid has gotten out of the consumer instant camera and film business, leaving their fans high and dry and wanting for the peculiar and unpredictable results that Polaroid prints produced. And this is where PolaDROID software steps in and attempts to fill the gap. Drag and drop your jpeg onto the Polaroid camera it places on your desktop, it whirs and grinds for a few seconds and then it spits out an undeveloped print. Then over the course of a couple minutes it develops before your eyes like an actual Polaroid print does, or did.





But the final result is where the real fun begins. The photos have a great vintage feel with funky color shifts and increased saturation. If you want, you can even add fingerprints and other imperfections to your prints. The cropping is kind of random and the results are always a surprise. The style seems to work particularly well with traditional hot rods and the people who drive them, and the files are large enough to make a good quality print the size of the original Polaroid print.







Check out the Poladroid website for a free download for Macs or a recently released Beta version for Windows. Try it with some of your own photos and post a few samples of the results here.

http://www.poladroid.net/

I think you'll find the whole process kind of addictive. The only issue I've had with the Windows Beta version so far is closing the application. Sometimes you have to close it thru the Task Manager.

 

Cool program. Thanks for the heads up. I can see where it would become addiciting!

 

Thanks for posting. Never heard of it. Can't wait to give it a go.

 

Big Fun, ain't it? I don't know who exactly put this software together but I like the way they think. After doing, I think, about eight pictures in one session a window popped up that said that "the film cartridge was empty, please close and reopen the program to load another pack of film"! Just like shooting with a real Polaroid only cheaper and easier to find "film" for!

 

Very cool, thanks for posting this...

 

It actually takes about the same amount of time for each print to "develop". Just like the 'ol days. Very cool, thanks for the link.

 

Neat idea! Thanks for posting it.

 

cool!

 

This is pretty neat!

 

neato

 

Just what I needed, another reason to spend endless hours on the computer.

 

I'm so glad you posted this! I just spent way too long playing with it.

 

Thanks alot! Much easier than trying to learn how to do that in Photoshop!

 

tra-di-tion-al

 

That is alot of fun. Here's a couple I did. They look old school now.

 

Thanks for posting a couple samples. The shot of the young girl turned out incredible! If anybody wonders how some people can get all sentimental about the look of old Polaroid photos, this pic should be all the proof they need.

A couple more samples of my experiments, grunged up a bit:







Digital cameras are really quite wonderful, but sometimes, after a while, the results can be almost too perfect and kind of cold. That's what makes Polaroid or Lomo prints so eye-catching. The colors aren't accurate, they look a little dark around the edges, the focus is a little soft, they're flawed and imperfect. Kind of like life.

 

Tried it out and it's pretty cool. Here's a couple pics from the last Pileup, a local cruise night and one of a B-17G that I took last summer.......

 

this is awsome

 

Thats a pretty cool program but it brings my computer to a screeching halt and is kind of awkward to use, hopefully they work the bugs out soon.

Heres a couple I did of my Comet:

 

i downloaded it today. pretty awesome

 

Love it, thanks for the link! I can play with this all day, it's MUCH better than working!

 

VERY cool!!!