Tutorial Create A Polaroid In Gimp

This is an easy tutorial that will teach you how to make any photo you take look like it was taken with an old Polaroid camera using Gimp 2.8. You will need an edit of a Polaroid which you can download here, and the photo you want to turn into a Polaroid.

I was designing a header for the Google Plus page I created for the blog. I thought a design using an old Polaroid shot would be fun. You can't get more amateur than the old Polaroid. So I searched the internet, found a scan of an old Polaroid, threw it in Gimp 2.8 and this is what I came up.

I use Gimp for a couple of reasons, mainly because it doesn't cost me anything, but also because I've used it for some time now and find it every bit as good as Photoshop or some of the other photo editing software out there. More on that in another post. If you know how to use Photoshop, this is a really easy tutorial and you should be able to do everything I show you here in Photoshop, no problem !

Stock photo supplied by:http://lured2stock.deviantart.com/art/Polaroid-3262470

O.K first thing you need to do is download the edit of the Polaroid I found. You can either download mine, or if you want to edit your own, click here. Now you need to open it in Gimp or Photoshop or whatever program your using. Once you load the graphic your only going to need to use two buttons to create this effect. The scale image button, and the rectangle tool. both shown in this graphic.

The buttons you will need to use are circled here.

Now you have your Polaroid image loaded in Gimp, this is the trickiest part of the tutorial, if you can achieve this I'm pretty sure your going to achieve success. Click on the rectangle tool and make a rectangle around the black part of the Polaroid by clicking on the upper left hand corner of the black square and then dragging it down to the lower right hand part of the square. You should now have the marching ants or whatever you want to call them around the black part of the Polaroid. Now go to the top of the program where it says file, edit, select, view, etc. and click on edit, then copy.

Now open the image you want to turn into a Polaroid, and click edit, paste as, new layer. This should give you two layers, one of the original image, and the other of the black box. The image must be larger than the black box. If it's not, you can either find an image that is or scale the Polaroid image down a bit and start over. I'll explain how to scale next.

O.K. if the image is larger than the black box, which it should be, go to the right of the screen, and in your layers box move the bottom layer of the photo above the black box layer. Now click on the scale tool to the left of the screen, click on the image that we're scaling and when the image is covered with the grid, click on the upper left hand corner and scale it down to the size of the black box in the layer below. Once you have it the proper size, go to edit, and select cut. (If your image wasn't larger than the black box, use this procedure to scale the Polaroid down a bit and start over.)

Now go back to the image of the complete Polaroid, click edit paste as new layer. This should paste the image into the Polaroid and it should be the same size as the black box now. If you have to reposition the new layer, just click on the move tool, which I forgot to highlight, sorry :( It's the button that looks like a plus sign made of arrows, it's the second button above the scale tool in my screen shot. Click on that then click on the image layer and position it into the black box. That's it your done. If your scale is off a little just click the scale tool again and adjust the image layer a bit more to fit the black box inside the Polaroid pic.

If I explained this properly, you should have something that looks like the following image.

This finished product.

Hopefully you found this tutorial helpful. I hope I didn't make it more complicated than it needs to be. The site is amateur photography, and I never claimed to be a Gimp pro either. If the tutorial worked out for you, leave a comment and let me know. If you thought this tutorial sucked, leave a comment and let me know and maybe I can adjust it so it's not so sucky. Thanks for reading and feel free to follow on blogger, or G+ !

Credits : Image of Polaroid taken from http://lured2stock.deviantart.com/art/Polaroid-3262470 Stop by there and check out some of the other stock photos they have, or drop them a comment of gratitude.