I recently figured out how to open the Photo Booth effects in Quartz Composer. Simply view the package contents of photobooth.app, then it’s Video.qtz under resources. But whenever I modified anything, it seemed to either freeze or take no effect.
Well, after a day or two of heavy experimentation with the file, I’ve managed to successfully put my own effects into Photo Booth:
For those that don’t use Photo Booth often enough to notice the new effects, I’ve added Edges, Pixelly, Trippy, and Blobs. There’s also Kaleidoscope in the second panel, which you can see in the image tray at the bottom. Blobs doesn’t actually work when taking pictures yet, it just produces an all-white image. It looks cool, though 😛
If you want to try out these effects for yourself, you can follow these steps:
- Duplicate Photo Booth.app – this hack overwrites some of the original effects, so you must make a duplicate if you ever want to use Sepia, Thermal, Mirror, or X-Ray again!
- Rename the duplicate something besides Photo Booth Copy.app
- Download this file
- Ctrl+Click the new Photo Booth.app and say ‘view package contents’
- Go to resources
- Move the downloaded file to the resources file, click ‘replace’ when the box pops up
- Go back to the applications folder and double-click the new Photo Booth.app
- Enjoy your new effects!
If you figure out how to make blobs take a picture correctly, please tell me.
Note: This hack will not change the labels for the effects panels. To do this, you have to edit Video1.strings and Video2.strings in Photo Booth duplicate.app/Resources/english.lproj using a text editor.