Getting Around in GIMP - Polaroid 600 Film Border Script

A while back I had written up a post and some Script-Fu for GIMP to emulate the colors I was seeing from very expired Polaroid 600 Instant film. That older post is here:

Getting Around in GIMP - Expired Polaroid 600 Film Effect

I basically loved the nasty color cast and funky things that part of the image did where the developer had dried up in the packets, and there wasn’t enough left to fully cover and develop the entire image area. If you head on over to that post, you’ll find what I did as well as color curves and some other Script-Fu to automatically apply those colors and degradations to your images. It’s also located at the GIMP Plugin Registry right here.

As part of creating that script, I also wanted to create a more realistic looking border script that would emulate the embossed patterns found on the original 600 Polaroid film.

I had a few requirements that I wanted to meet, though. I was still cutting my teeth on Script-Fu, so I wanted it to be a script. I also wanted to make sure that the script could be run on almost any image, regardless of image size, and I wanted the embossing pattern to emulate the real stuff and to scale correctly based on the size of the image.

So I worked on it a while, and then promptly forgot about it.

Well, I recently came across this script again and figured I should get it out into the wild before it completely bit rots on my hard drive. It works, and manages to hit all of my personal requirements, though there were a few more things I wanted to play with.

So, this script will automatically create the correctly sized Polaroid 600 borders for you, and do all scaling so the embossing pattern is the right size as well.

The dimensions of the borders and image area are dependent on your image width.

That previous line is important. This script will not work correctly if your image is wider than taller. To get around this you can just crop your image to make the height taller than width, then move the borders around over your full size image. Just try it, you’ll see what I mean.

You can also run the script on a new, blank image where you can set the dimensions for the image to whatever you’d like (as long as the height is greater than the width), then add any image as a layer to that under everything.

Enough talk. You can find the script for this border effect over on the GIMP Plugin Registry here:

Polaroid Border Creation (based on image width) with Texture

or you can download the script directly.

It might take a few moments to run, but let it do its thing and it should get there.

Hopefully this will prove useful to others! If you have any questions or comments, let me know below.