Polaroid photo cameras were very popular in the 70s and 80s. Unlike the older film based cameras which made you wait for 3-4 days before your film could be developed in a photo studio, the then newer Polaroid cameras presented people with instant photo generation feature. After taking the picture with those Polaroid cameras, the photo paper would simply ooze out of it in a matter of seconds. Then you had to dry the photo paper by shaking it in air and the photo would appear on it slowly. If you miss that age and time, then the free Poladroid application is for you. Poladroid is a Windows & Mac application that can simulate the older Polaroid cameras on your computer and give your digital pictures a Polaroid look, making them appear like 30-40 years old.
You can download the Poladroid application from their website. The program is available both for Mac and Windows in form of a setup installer. After the installation, you can run Poladroid from its desktop shortcut. The application does not have a regular window, but it displays a picture of Polaroid camera. You can drag and drop any of your JPEG pictures on to this camera image and it would start applying the Polaroid effect on it.
The resulting picture would be displayed in its own rotated frame. At first you will not see anything but a light brown background. Then slowly, the picture starts to appear – just like in a real Polaroid camera. If you want to speed up the process, then drag the picture left and right quickly – as if you are drying it by shaking in the air. When the picture is ready, it rings a bell and a red-cross is placed on the photo frame. You can save it or upload to Flickr by right-clicking on it and choosing the appropriate option.
In the settings for Poladroid (which you can open by clicking on the blue-circle icon on the Poladroid window and then selecting Settings) you can choose to apply blur effects, vignetting level and stripes. You can also choose a destination folder for the output images.
So if you are missing those good old days of your teen years when you laughed all day long with your friends and stayed up all night long talking over the phone, and somewhere in the middle found the time to snap those lovely moments using your Polaroid camera, then you can revive those memories by giving your digital pictures a Polaroid look using the free Poladroid application.
You can download Poladroid from http://www.poladroid.net/.