When I was looking around for Photoshop actions that would make my pictures look like Polaroid scans, I was really disappointed to find not very much at all. I like Phil J. Rose’s Polaroid Border, but it’s distinctive enough to only be good for one image per post. I used it for the first image in yesterday’s post; see how it’s awesome, but also sort of a one-shot solution? So I ended up making my own, and I figured I’d put it out there in case anyone else finds it useful. It doesn’t offer nearly as much character or realism as Rose’s, but it should make it easy to set up a small gallery of ‘Polaroids’.
A brief description follows:
Download the Photoshop file (9.2 MB)
Polaroid Template Photoshop File
by
Lance McCord
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License
.
Border and Film
The final image is built up from the original image in a couple of steps. The first, which tries to get the basic Polaroid instant film, is in the “Border and Film” folder (sown in the layers palette to the left).
Working up from the source image, there’s a levels adjustment later that flattens the image a bit and throws the color off-kilter. (My adjustments here are what looked good to me for this particular image, and not based on any actual, you know, “knowledge” about the tint characteristics of Polaroid instant film. Getting stuff right is for chumps!)
Then there’s a “Streak” layer that can be used to simulate the color streaking that sometimes happens with Polaroid instant film. It’s another levels adjustment later (flattening the image more and skewing it towards reddish-brown) with a layer mask that I made by painting with white on black using a grungy border brush, and then stretching it to the length of the picture. This mask is one of the things about this file that can be quickly changed to keep all of your images from looking exactly alike.
Then a mask layer that’s just there to keep the source image and the adjustments we just made from peaking around the edges of our border, and a drop shadow layer to give some depth to the finished product.
Finally (for this step), the border is just a slightly off-white Polaroid border shape. I went with a 4x5 rectangle with a square cut out of it, but this was mostly a guess. I added two layer styles: a bevel and a pattern to give the border some depth and texture.
Schmutz and Depth
I wanted to give the print some character, and looking at a few pictures of Polaroid prints (I didn’t have any actual prints to look at), I noticed that the convex edges of the border (along the outer edges, and then again around the film itself) are a focal point for dirt and grit, and also throw back a little more light than the lower (concave) portions of the border in between.
Before getting to that, though, there’s a duplicate of the “Border” layer from the last step that has been adjusted towards a dingy yellow and set to multiply. I also adjusted the scale and depth of the texture layer style to rough up the surface of the border. This is the first of several layers to use “Render > Difference Clouds” layer mask. This introduces some semi-random deviation into the layer as applied, and it will be easy to adjust this deviation for other images by deleting the contents of the mask and running the Difference Clouds filter again. The result should be subtle differences in the finished products.
The two “Puff” layers are meant to simulate the puffier areas on the border, and basically lighten the image in those spots (around the outer edge of the border and around the film, with the bottom edge of the inner puffy section a bit below the actual image). They each began as an eight-pixel white rectangle on black in approximately the right place, and were then run through a few filters (ocean ripple, glass, blur and anisotropic diffuse) to make them seem more random. Then the layers were set to screen and warped into their proper positions. Difference Clouds layer masks add an additional chaotic element that can be quickly adjusted on an image-by-image basis.
The two “Smudge” layers are done the same way, except with a yellowish-brown rectangle on white and set to darken.
I didn’t know what to call the “Dimple” layer, so it has a stupid name. It’s just a bit of one of the “Smudge” layers stretched and moved into place between the bottom inner puffy area and the bottom of the image to shade the slightly lower region on a Polaroid border. This is the part of this whole thing I’m least happy with, as it seems there’s a real chance here to capture some of the specific subtle characteristics that make a Polaroid instant instantly recognizable, and my solution bypasses this opportunity in favor of a big smudge. But you have to let it go at some point, right?
Finishing Touches
By adjusting the opacity of the “Schmutz and Depth” folder (and the various layers within the folder) you can add or subtract age and wear on your photo. Here are some cool things I didn’t do anything about: damage to the border (all the lines are perfectly straight); bending; scratches on the film; stray scuffs and marks on the border. Some of those things seem pretty easy, others pretty hard. But this template should get you something that, even if it isn’t mistaken for a scan of the real thing, probably won’t look like a cheap photoshop trick. Hopefully.