2009-12-20

Gimp Polaroid Filter

To make my photo posting on my blog more interesting, I have usually resorted to use Gimp's "Round Corner" Script-Fu. I like this script because it drops a shadow so that my photos seems pop up from the background.

Later on, I encountered several blogs on internet like:
Gimp Making Border (in Chinese) (link)
Turn a digital photo into Polaroid with Gimp (link)

The idea is to make a digital photo resemble a photo-print and make it lay on a surface with some irregular shadows.

I very like this idea but find the steps clumsy if I have repeatedly do photo postings on my blog.

So... I start to write my first Gimp script!

Most of the Gimp macros are written in Script-Fu. It is said that it is a language called Scheme (however, I have learned Lisp before and I still cannot differentiate Scheme from Lisp because of their similarity!)

I hate Lisp because the proliferation of brackets and I have difficulties to make the opening and closing brackets match.

Anyway, after a one-day tutorial on learning the Script-Fu, my first Gimp script is born. It works as follows:
  • it adds a border to similar the print paper
  • it creates a shadow and then use the perspective effect to make the shadow irregular
  • it finally adds a background to match my blog background
I have tested my script in my two only Gimp environments, viz. version 2.2.17 (on Win98SE) and 2.6.2 (on Win XPP)

Installation steps:
  • download the script (link)
  • put it to the script directory (in my Windows environment, it is C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\share\gimp\2.0\scripts)

Execution steps:

- open a photo, like


- run the script, which will solicit the following parameters


- the result is as follows: