Turn Digital Photos Into Polaroids

Bring back a sense of a bygone era and add space for comments on your photos.

Dave Johnson

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Even if you didn't grow up with Polaroid cameras, there's something about the look of those instant photos that feels fun, friendly, and inviting. Maybe it's the sense of nostalgia they evoke; perhaps it's the little white space underneath every photo that invites you to scrawl a message. Whatever the reason, the image of the Polaroid lives on well past the age when photos from those cameras were common.

If you want to bring back a sense of that bygone era, you can make your digital photos look like they came from a Polaroid camera, complete with a seemingly handwritten message in the frame.

Crop the Picture

The most common Polaroid format was a square picture encased in a rectangular white border. That's the look we're going to reproduce today. To get started, you'll need a picture. Load any image that would make a good snapshot into your favorite image editor; I'll use Corel's Paint Shop Pro for this example. If you don't have a photo handy, you can download this one.

Click the Crop tool, which lives in the third cubby from the top of the toolbar on the left side of the screen. We want to crop the image into a perfect square, so we'll force the crop box to stay square as we resize it. If the Tool Options palette isn't at the top of the screen, turn it on by choosing View, Palettes, then Tool Options. Set the units to pixels and set both width and height to 400. Finally, click the check box for "Maintain aspect ratio."

Now resize the crop box in the picture until you've composed your snapshot, perhaps something like this. Depending on your screen resolution, your crop may comprise a larger or smaller section of the picture.

Finally, click the check box in Tool Options to complete the crop.

Add the Border

It's easy to add a border to a photo in Paint Shop Pro. Choose Image, Add Borders from the menu. In the Add Borders dialog box, first make sure that the border is white. If it's not, click in the color square and select white from the palette, like so.

When you click OK to save the color change, you'll be back in the Add Borders dialog box. Now add a thin border to the top and sides, and a thicker border to the bottom. For my sample picture, be sure the Symmetric check box is not checked, then try 10 pixels on the top and sides and 100 on the bottom. If you don't like the result, undo the settings, adjust your numbers, and try again.

Add Some Text

We're almost done; all that's left is to add a little text to complete the illusion. Click the Text tool, which is the letter A, fourth from the bottom of the toolbar. In the Tool Options palette, set the font size to 36 and make sure that the text is set to Vector in the Create as drop-down menu.

Now, look for a script-like font. Click the Font drop-down menu and scroll until you find a font that reminds you of handwriting.

There's one more thing to do before we add text to the picture. In the Materials palette on the right side of the screen, click an ink color. A left click selects the text, while a right click selects the text's outline color.

Finally, click in the lower left corner of the picture border and you'll see the text entry box appear. Type your message, then click Apply. You can easily reposition the text by dragging the text from the center to move it and resize it by dragging it by its corners. Here's my final photo looks like.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Stormy," by Jason Barnes, Yosemite, California

About this week's photo, Jason says: "I took this photo with a Nikon CoolPix 5400 in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, just south of Mammoth Lakes in California. We were walking to a nearby natural hot spring, late in the day, as the sun was setting and a storm was moving in ahead of us. We sat and watched the storm come in for a few moments before retreating to the van just in time to witness a downpour of rain and a spectacular lightning storm. The low angle of the sun provided a great opportunity to capture our shadows, and the dark, stormy sky added a great dramatic ground to the sagebrush."