Editing the Travelogue Polaroid
Friday the 20th of May, 2005
There have been many requests on how to edit and insert a customized picture into the polaroid in my Travelogue theme. It does take a bit of Photoshop know-how, perhaps in the future I’ll make it easier to do. That said, it really isn’t all that difficult, just follow these steps:
- Copy the picture you want to insert as the polaroid, but do not paste it yet.
- Turn off the top three layers that serve as an intro to the PSD.
- Open the “Polaroid” layer set, and find the layer with the current image in it (should be the fourth one), click it.
- Paste your new image in. It should appear as a new layer above almost everything, but below the polaroid. If not, move the layer around until it does.
- You may wish to rotate your picture layer to make it appear straight inside the box. This is kind of a “tweak it till it’s right” step.
- Now Ctrl + Click on the vector mask (the little grey looking box next to the actual preview) of the old polaroid picture layer. This should load up a selection of the outline of the inside of the polaroid. Hopefully you can get the step in correctly, it’s the tricky/important one.
- Finally, making sure that your new polaroid picture layer is still selected, click on the “Quick Mask” button at the bottom of the layers palette, should be the second one from the left, a grey box with a white circle in the middle.
If all done correctly, you should now have a perfectly masked new polaroid picture! Just pop into ImageReady and export that slice with the new pic! Oh, how to do this? Well…
- Save the file you have just edited.
- Go File > Jump to ImageReady. Photoshop will now open up ImageReady with your file.
- In the toolbar, select and hold the Slice button (looks like a knife) until other buttons pop up, then select the Slice Select button (looks the same, but with an arrow).
- Select the slice that contains the polaroid. You should only have to click on it.
- Go File > Save Optimized As, and change the bottom drop-down to “Selected Slice Only”. Then save it where you want!
And that’s it, you should now be set. I would highly encourage you to learn Photoshop, if you have it at your disposal. You will be a better webizen for doing so. Good luck!
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21 Comments to Editing the Travelogue Polaroid
by Ken Walker
On June 12, 2005 at 2:43 am
Josh,
Thanks for the Travelogue theme. I’ve used a modified version for our upcoming trip to Paris. It’s located at http://www.dbtally.com/blog
Merci !
by Ken Fox
On June 13, 2005 at 12:46 pm
All these manual steps drove me nuts when I wanted a slew of polaroid images for my random selector.
That is why I split out the polaroid frame and wrote a Python script to take 205×195 JPEGs and wrap them in the polaroid frame. The post has a link to the script.
With current versions of PHP with GD it would be easy to do this in PHP but my ISP didn’t have a version of GD that supported PNG alpha channels correctly then. They since upgraded.
by :::gear:::
On August 16, 2005 at 8:38 pm
Hi!
I really like this skin, I used it when my friend asked me to make a blog for him. (http://onepointzero.fw.hu) My only problem with the skin is that it misses the “Previous entries” link to previous pages of blogs. Why is that?
Anyway, thanks for the skin – great idea!
by tash
On September 17, 2005 at 8:09 pm
its really good
by Yentl Langholz
On October 6, 2005 at 6:43 am
Hello,
I am somehow too stuip to find the PDS for downloading on this site. Can you help me?
Thanks for your support!
by Ginni
On February 5, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Hiya – I have a different question about the site and I’ll probably feel stupid when I hear the answer – but I cannot figure out where to edit the bit that says, hi my name is Traveler, etc. please tell!!
many thanks,
Ginni
by james
On April 7, 2008 at 10:57 am
I was unable to extract the .zip file that contains the psd files. I downloaded the .zip from the link on your site.
-James
by Steve
On April 10, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Yes, the travelogue_psds.zip is damaged (it is only 667.648 bytes). Can you replace it and send me a notice please? Thanks!
Steve
by Tanya
On April 14, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Please let me know if/when the psds will be fixed. I would love to use this theme.
thanks
Tanya
by Kris
On April 24, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Y’all, I found another place to get the .psd file, http://dev.wp-themes.org/browser/travelogue/trunk/travelogue.psd
It will tell you to download it.
Hope that helps!
by uplink
On May 10, 2008 at 10:30 am
The PSD has been reuploaded, ya’all can download it now.
by Melissa
On June 21, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Hi Joshua,
I am new to this blog and just in the developing stages. I really like the feel of your template which is why I downloaded…especially because of the rotating pictures. But I would like to change the background brown picture in the header to one of my own pictures; but I can’t figure out how to do it. I’ve tried resizing but that didn’t work either. Can you help me? Keep in mind I am a newbie and detailed instructions would be very much appreciated! Thank you,
Melissa
by Joshua
On July 1, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Melissa, glad you like the look! You will need to modify (preferably) the Photoshop file, or edit polaroid1.jpg and header1_img.jpg (much more difficult). Or perhaps you are talking about getting an actual picture in the polaroid? If so, make sure you put your resized images in the randimages folder of the theme. If that is not working, send me a link so that I can troubleshoot.
by Sandra Coburn
On July 5, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Hi, Joshua. Love your theme. I resized some photos and put them in the randimages folder. They showed up for a short time, but now they don’t. Can you tell me what might be wrong?
by Joshua
On July 5, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Sandra, change line 19 of header.php to be rotatorm.php instead of rotator.php. I’m not sure why, but some people have troubles with the original rotator script, but I tried the second script (rotatorm.php) on your server, and it pulled up the images just fine. Let me know how it goes.
by Sandra Coburn
On July 6, 2009 at 7:08 am
Terrific! That fixed it. The dates are incorrect on my posts, though. How do I fix that? The date shows up correctly on the settings page. Weird.
by Sandra Coburn
On July 6, 2009 at 7:33 am
Date is correct now — used to say the 9th, now says the 6th. Didn’t do anything to change it — very strange.
by Heather
On July 11, 2009 at 11:34 pm
I’ve uploaded some photos to randimages folder but they won’t show up. I tried the script edit you suggested to Sandra but that didn’t work. Other suggestions?
by Debty
On July 26, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Ahaan… I will follow.
by Sophie
On January 31, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Hi,
I’m using the Travelogue theme on my blog and like it a great deal. But I’m having great difficulties with the random photos in the header. Looking at the instructions, I’m afraid I’m none the wiser. To begin with: where do I find the folder called “randimages”?
by Joshua
On February 2, 2010 at 10:37 am
Everyone with questions about the randimages folder, the polaroid, or many other Travelogue theme-related questions, I just put up a post hoping to answer a lot of these, check it out at this Travelogue post. Hope that helps!