How to Do Polaroid Lifts in 2025

In this post you’re going to learn how to turn a regular polaroid photo into a unique work of art! The technique is called a polaroid transfer emulsion lift - it’s an alternative photographic process that’s been around for at least 50 years, and involves lifting the image off a polaroid print and transferring it to another surface. This surface is often paper, but the cool thing is that you can actually transfer the photo to just about anything, and the process is exactly the same.

Polaroid transfers are pretty simple in theory but tricky in execution, and there are a few bits of gear you’ll need to get it done. A polaroid camera is the most obvious one to start with, along with some polaroid film. You’ll also need some scissors, a tray, a selection of brushes, a pipette, a plastic cup, some gloves and a kettle. Lastly, you’ll need a surface to put the image onto, and a thick water colour paper, around 300gsm, is a good place to start.

Step 1: Trim the Polaroid

First you want to fill up your kettle with regular old tap water and pop it on the boil. While this is heating up, grab your polaroid and trim off the white edges so you are only left with the image. You don’t have to trim it square either, you can cut it to any shape you want, so feel free to get creative!

Step 2: Soak the Polaroid

Once the water is boiled, you are going to pour it into the tray and pop the photo in to soak. The water I’m using here is between 80 - 90 degrees celsius, or around 175 -195 degrees fahrenheit. 

Step 3: Peel the Polaroid

After soaking for 5 minutes, you’re going to grab your glove and put it on your non-dominant hand, which will help protect you from a majority of the chemistry inside the polaroid. Then, test out the edges of the print, until you find one that has a bit of give, and begin the peeling process. You can’t go too slowly with this step, in fact, you should aim to go as slow as possible, at least until you get a feel for the right amount of tension there should be while peeling.

There are 5 ‘layers’ to the polaroid print. A plastic front, behind which sits a clearish sort of  ‘gel’ layer. You’ve then got your emulsion which is holding your image, and behind that the chemistry and then the negative. While doing the peel, one of two things will happen, your photo will either stick to the chemistry on the back of the print or to the clear gel at the front. Depending on where it ends up will slightly change what you do for your next step.

If it sticks to the chemistry, the emulsion will be very delicate, but it will come away very easily. You can just pop it back in your first bath, which should still be hot enough to lift it, but while you are handling the image, be sure to treat it with a heap of care.I find 95% of the time however it sticks to the gel layer, which makes it a little trickier to lift but it also gives the emulsion a lot more strength and structure. If it does this, you want to pour out your old bath and fill your tray with fresh boiling water. Now there is a third option, that is that it sticks to both the top and the bottom and ends up in a couple of pieces. This can feel like a bit of a bummer at the time, but don’t give up on it yet as the result often looks more interesting than if things work perfectly. My suggestion when this happens would be to pop the back half into your original bath, and trim the front half with some scissors along the tear and then soak this half in fresh boiling water. 

Step 4: Lifting the Emulsion

For the post-peel soak, you are going to leave it for another five minutes to give the emulsion a chance to soften up, and after the wait you can begin to brush the image off. If it’s stuck to the chemistry it should float away without any trouble at all, and if it’s stuck to the glue you might need to work it over a bit with the brush. This can be a little nerve wracking, but you’d be surprised how resilient it is. Once it’s lifted, scoop it up into your plastic cup, discard the water, and fill the tray back up with cooler, room temperature water for the final bath.

Step 5: Untangling the Emulsion

Grab your piece of paper and pop this in the water along with your loose emulsion. What you’ve got to do now is untangle the image, and this is where a HUGE dose of patience is going to come in handy. Go slowly with it, using your hands and the brush to unravel the photo until you’ve got at least one of the edges flat. Sometimes the front of the brush (that is the side with the bristles) will catch and risk tearing the emulsion, so I’ll often also use the back of the brush as well while I’m doing this.

Step 6: Transferring the Emulsion

Now that you’ve got at least one flat, straight edge, you can grab onto the corners of the emulsion with your thumbs, and while holding onto it and the paper, gently lift everything out of the water. This will get the image to stick, and don’t stress if it looks like a bit of a mess now, because we are going to fix it next.

Step 7: Straightening the Photo

Keep dunking the photo back in the water, but don’t submerge the whole image, just the side you are trying to straighten. Often the un-submerged side will stay in place, but if it starts sliding around you can prevent this by holding onto the edge opposite to the one you are dunking. While it’s in the water, give it a shake and keep pulling it out of the water until you’ve gotten it flat. Spin the paper around and do this for each side, and by the end you should have a perfectly flat print. If there are any particularly stubborn bits, you can also untangle things a little by combining this technique with the brush, dipping the side you are adjusting into the water and moving the emulsion with a lot more precision.

Step 8: Get Creative with It

Now the tricky bits are done, give yourself a pat on the back! You can end the process here, however, in my opinion it seems a bit of a waste to go to all this effort just to end up with a photo that looks pretty similar to what you started with. Instead, I find it much more interesting to manipulate the print a bit, which you can do by brushing wrinkles into the edges, forming it into interesting shapes, or tearing into the emulsion. Get creative and see what you come up with, and if you don’t like what you’ve done you can always just pour some water on top to straighten things up again.

Once you are done, leave your print somewhere to dry, but keep it out of direct sunlight or the colours will change. If the paper ends up a bit wonky after it’s dried, you can flatten it out by popping in under some heavy books for a while.

Tips and Troubleshooting

This all looks well and good when things work out, however despite having made about 200 of these in the last six months, I can tell you that things often go wrong, and it’s been really difficult to pin down what causes the process to succeed or fail. One thing I’ve discovered however, is that climate seems to play a large role in getting a good peel. While I was doing these in Europe over Christmas, although it was tricky keeping the photos warm enough to develop properly, everything worked like a dream when it came to the lift. In Australia however I've had a lot more trouble, and it seems like the hotter the environment is, the more trouble you are likely to have.

To combat this you want to keep your photo cold after it’s fully developed. Back home, I’ve had the most success in the studio by leaving the print for 30 minutes, and then popping it into the fridge until I want to do the transfer - and in the field you want to take something like a cold pack with you to keep it cool. The optimal time for doing the transfer seems to be between around 1-24 hours, and leaving it longer than this runs the risk of the chemistry hardening too much. Even if I plan on doing the transfer straight away, popping it in the fridge to get cold after the photo develops seems to help during the peel. And obviously it isn’t always super practical to keep your polaroid cold if you're shooting outdoors, but it does seem like no matter how long you’ve left the image out, cooling it down before doing the transfer helps with the peeling process.

The longer you leave your polaroid before doing the transfer, the more likely it is that the chemistry hardens and sticks to the back of your emulsion once it’s been peeled. This hardening also seems to speed up in a warmer environment. You can sometimes brush the chemistry off while it’s soaking, particularly if the polaroid is fresh, but if it’s an older photo the chemistry will likely be too hard and you also run the risk of tearing the emulsion. While it won’t completely ruin the final result if this chemistry is left behind, you can see these marks it makes through the image after doing the transfer, so it should be avoided as much as possible.

Another thing that can sometimes happen is that the gel layer can begin to separate from the emulsion layer after you’ve done the lift. While not a deal breaker, it can affect how clean the final result looks, and can also get tangled and make it difficult to get a smooth finish. You can, however, very, VERY carefully, peel the emulsion and gel layers apart. Warning though, this is incredibly fiddly and comes with a high risk of tearing. You need to use a cold water bath to first strengthen the emulsion, and then go super, super slowly with it. But, with a bit of patience, you can separate them and end up with a nicer print. Honestly it isn’t that big a deal most of the time if you see the emulsion and gel layer separating a bit, so I wouldn’t stress about this too much unless you want to be really pedantic about things.

With a bit of practice it becomes quite easy to obtain perfectly flat, clean transfers, and you’ll likely pick this up without too much trouble. The trickier part I find is the alterations you do afterwards, like creating the creases or tearing the image. Once I get the initial transfer done, I’ll set aside some water and pour the rest out so I can lay the paper flat in the tray. The emulsion will stick to the paper and tear easily if you try to move it once it is out of the water, so the trick to manipulating the print at this stage is to re-wet it, but do so selectively on the areas you wish to change.

You can do this by using your pipette to drop some water on the edges, as well as wetting your brush, and then you’ll be able to push and pull that part of the photo around without too much trouble. Sometimes if you put a lot of water on top the changes you make won’t set, but you can fix this by dabbing the area around the photo with some paper towel to soak up any excess liquid. 

You will be surprised by how much flexibility you have to move the image around by using this method, to the point where you can wet the whole image and slowly pull it around the paper if you need to reposition it entirely. With some exploration, you’ll pick up a few tricks using the pipette and brush, such as fixing the edges that are caught underneath the image by sliding the paint bush under the photo and pulling the edge back out. Try roughing up the edges, tearing into the image and creating different shapes. Get creative, don’t be afraid to ruin a few photos, and see what kind of manipulations you can come up with!

And that’s how you can successfully do a polaroid transfer emulsion lift. Happy snapping!