These are not the Polaroids you're looking for...

The Polaroid self-developing instant film is a modern icon, known and recognized far beoynd the realm of photographers. Last year Polaroid ceased production of thir instant film. Why? Because digital cameras are even more instant, and produce pictures with better colors at a lower price. So Polaroid lost to the digital era.

As always, we do not fully appreciate things until they are gone. Polaroids are getting more and more press as we speak. Everyone wants to work with Polaroids. But press alone is not enough to save the film production.

However, a group of people have started what seems to be an almost impossible project, to revive instant film. They have bought the machinery from Polarioids factory in Enschede, Netherlands, and aim to start production of a new, improved instant film in 2010. At the moment, they call themself The Impossible Project. Best of luck to you, guys!

But do you really want an improved instant film? Speaking for myself, the real beauty of Polaroid instant film lies in the wonderful colors the developed pictures show. It is a world of very calm colors. And when seen through the plastic lens of one of Polaroids cheaper cameras, showing heavy vignetting and other strange artefacts. You can't get that with digital.

Poladroid

Or can you? Why, of course you can! You can either spend som time in your favourite photo program, tweaking your picture until it resembles a Polaroid. Or, you can download the application Poladroid for Macintosh or Windows computers. It is currently in beta and freeware. It alters any .jpg image into a 1392 x 1692 Polaroid-lookalike, complete with borders (and fingerprints, if you should so wish). It even mimics the sound and development, for those of us who like to see the picture appear. You can shake the picture for a speedier development. All in all a very nice app.

Poladroid polaroid

iPhone apps

And for us iPhone-users, there are a bunch of apps in the App Store that help us develop (sorry) a fancy for faked Polaroids. I am currently using three, Polarock, Polarize and CameraBag.

Polarize

At the moment, my favorite is Polarize. As with most iPhone Camera filter programs, you can take a picture within the app, or you can choose an existing image. The resulting pictures are fixed in size to 450 x 520 pixels. I would like to see a way to save a larger picture even though those things eat system resources.... Polarize is free (as in beer), it does beautiful borders and vignettes, and good although a bit hard colors. You can add up to 14 characters that gets written to the bottom frame of the saved picture. A winner.

Polarize polaroid

Polarock

Our next contestant is Polarock. It is yours for the small sum of whatever-is your-localized-version-of iTunes-equivalent-of-$0.99, so it is unlikely to push you out in the streets, even during the recession. Unlike Polarize it allows for a lot of different effects, called "styles", including "B&W", which turns the picture black and white , "Center" which gives a hard vignette, and one called "Grunge". The latter makes the picture look like you had found it in the street.  I am not totally satisfied with the interface used in applying the styles, and anyway, if I want to fiddle with effects I will load up Photoshop, OK? Polarock also lets you write on the frame, btw. The main drawback here is the size of the saved image. 320 x 461 makes for quick application of the different styles, but it is starting to get painfully small. I'm not altogether impressed.

Polarize polaroid

CameraBag

Finally the multi-effect CameraBag has a Polaroid effect, called "Instant". It is a nice app, with some really nice effects, but as we are only interested in Polaroid clones at this moment we will return to CameraBag's other filters in a future post. Thankfully all the different filters  can be individually switched on and off. So with just the Instant filter on you can use CameraBag as a Polaroid camera. You can change the size of the output picture, up to 1010 x 1202, making the resulting images the largest by far. (Note: this applies only to the Instant filter, other CameraBag filters have different max sizes based on picture width/heigh ratio.) The color scheme does a very good Polaroid imitation, with an overall red shift. But it does not do a structured frame, nor can you add text to the frame. And last but not least, at $2.99 it is the most expensive app of the three. Photographic result: Very good. Fun Polarioid iPhone app: close but no cigar.

CameraBag polaroid

To conclude, if you have an iPhone, get Polarize. If not, use Poladroid. If you do not have a computer, or use a system that can not run Poladroid, wait for the Impossible Project to succeed.

Are there any other Polaroid apps for digital pictures out there I have not mentioned? Please add them in the comments.