Fun Polaroid Simulator Will Waste Many Hours

The Polaroid is dead. It was killed by the digital camera, which obviated the Polaroid’s headline feature — instant photos — by making them even more instant, and even better, by making them free.

Which is a shame, as the Polaroid had another appeal. The photos it produced had a certain look to them, a vignetted, low-fi quality which many loved. Now, you can have both: the speed and convenience of digital with the low quality and imperfections of instant film.

Toycamera’s Analogcolor isn’t the first Polaroid simulator, but it is the best I have seen so far. The $10 java application runs on both OS X and Windows. You drop a jpeg onto the window and from there you can mercilessly degrade your image in many ways, from vignetting to blowing out highlights. You can select from a number of presets which mimic Polaroid or other film development processes, and the latest version even simulates the tell-tale red and orange streaks of light leaks.

This adjustably is what sets it apart from other Polaroid-style apps. The trial version watermarks the pictures and limits export size, but the results are fine, as you can see from the picture above (shot in New York’s Chinatown). Will I be buying it? No. I’ll be spending way more than $10 worth of my time trying to emulate the effects in Lightroom. For me, that counts as entertainment.

Product page [Pentacom]

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