How to Make a Polaroid Framed Pictures for Your Images in Photoshop

On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn demonstrates how to take an image and give it a Polaroid-like look in Photoshop.

The days of Polaroid photography are (mostly) behind us, but a lot of people still love the look of the square framed image and this quick guide Nace shows us how to take a regular image and turn it into a  vintage looking Polaroid one.
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To start with you will need a Polaroid image to be used as the background (Nace used a specific one which doesn’t seem to be around any more – you can find a million others online – just make sure that you can legally use it).  You need to select the area inside the Polaroid and than create a layer mask and play with it until you have the composition just right (remember that you can unlink the mask from the original layer – just remember to re-link it later on).
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The next step is to add an adjustment look by adding a sepia tone – adding a clipping mask will only effect the layer below (i.e. the image not the Polaroid). Finally you can add a flare and even add a little bit of a Gaussian blur. If you you really want you can even add some text (and with layer style make it blend with the Polaroid).
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You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).
Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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