Creating a polaroid effect in Photoshop

The tempate used in this tutorial is again dependent on smart objects. If you just want to take the Photoshop file and run, by all means feel free.

<p>All you have to do to put your photo in the &#8216;frame&#8217; rather than my one of Florence is:</p>

<ul>
    <li>Click the &#8216;photo&#8217; layer in the layers pallette</li>
    <li>From the menu at the top of the Photoshop window choose (Layer &#62; Smart Objects &#62; Replace contents&#8230;</li>
    <li>Navigate to where you have your new photo stored, select it and click Place</li>
    <li>You may have to re-transform your photo to fit correctly in the photo area (to do this press Ctrl + T on the PC, or Cmd + T on the Mac)</li>
</ul>

<h4>Doing it yourself</h4>

<p>If you&#8217;d rather set the template up yourself, then you need to (sorry &#8211; screenshots to follow):</p>

<ol>
    <li>Create a new canvas with a white background</li>
    <li>Draw a white rectangle, rotate it slightly and give it a drop-shadow and inside stroke</li>
    <li>Ctrl or Cmd click on the thumbnail of the photo paper so that the outline of the paper is loaded into a selection</li>
    <li>Choose Select &#62; Modify &#62; Contract&#8230; and shrink the selection by a certain amount of pixels (the amount depends on how big your canvas is to start with &#8211; try it a few times until the border is how you like it)</li>
    <li>Set the default colour by pressing the &#8216;D&#8217; key</li>
    <li>Swap them around by presing the &#8216;X&#8217; key</li>
    <li>Pres the Alt + Delete key to fill the selection with black</li>
    <li>Ctrl or Cmd T to initiate a free tranform and drag the bottom middle handle up a bit so that the bottom border is thicker that the top, left and right ones.  (Just use your eye on this step to get it how you&#8217;d expect a Polaroid to look).</li>
    <li>Now select File &#62; Place&#8230;, choose your photo and click Place.  This will place the photo as a smart object into your photoshop file.  It should have place it above the photo area layer (the black one) &#8211; if it didn&#8217;t just drag it into the correct place.</li>
    <li>Now hover the mouse between the photo layer and the photo area layer and press the alt key.  You should see the cursor change to something that looks like a venn diagram. Click the mouse button once and you&#8217;ll see the photo layer be clipped to the area below it, thus hiding the bits you don&#8217;t want</li>
    <li>Now all that remains to do is to rotate all your layers slightly to bring the photo to life.</li>
</ol>

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