As well as the Pom Poms, our polaroids have been pretty popular and received a lot of comments from people wanting to know how to do these after our wedding featured on Rock My Wedding.
Since it was Pete who made these, I asked him to write up a little how to…
“Well, I guess the easiest way would be to use a polaroid camera, but here’s how to adapt your photos into cool vintage polaroids.
These polaroids were great as personalised placecards and as hanging decoration.
Here’s a simple how to.
You need:
- Lots of photos – get stalking Facebook!
- Poladroid
- Something to edit your photos – I used the built in Preview on the Mac but Windows Live Photo Gallery or Paint will do just as well.
Instructions:
1. Preparation
- If you’re creating lots of polaroids, arrange your photos into folders – this helps you to sort through the polaroids for printing later on.
- Open Poladroid and set the preferences – I preferred it without blur effect to give crisper photos, having stripes on the paper gives it the proper polaroid feel and vignetting puts the faded border round the picture that gives that instant processing look.
- Finally, set it to save your polaroids in the same folder as the original file, then all the organising you’ve done won’t be wasted
2. Get snappin’
- Start dragging in your photos. Poladroid only takes ten at a time, then you’ve got to shut it and reopen the program again. If you get bored waiting for the photos to process, you can shake them about on the screen to speed up the process, just like a real polaroid!
- Now to check how your photos turned out. If your polaroids all look fine, you’re done! Otherwise if a couple need editing, carry on to part 3.
3. Editing your photos
- The majority of my pictures came out fine, but a few needed editing – the image that comes out of a polaroid camera is almost square, so if you’ve got portrait oriented photos that are taller than wide, it may end up chopping people’s heads off! Similarly if you’ve got photos where the subject isn’t in the middle, you may need to edit those.
- Here’s one that has a lot of background to edit out. Open your original photo in your editing program, select an area slightly higher than it is wide, and crop the photo – it doesn’t matter that it’s not the exact shape of the polaroid, Poladroid will sort that out for you. Save your photo and pop it back through poladroid.
You’re done! I made around 150 of these, and it took me a couple of evenings.”
Thanks Pete x
