PhotoBooth and iChat Hack: Uncover Star Wars Hologram Effect

Been fiddling around with Leopard for the past few hours. I have a lot of things to say in the pipeline but before that, I’d like to show you a little trick I picked up while browsing the forums. In the beta stages of Leopard, a PhotoBooth effect for the Star Wars hologram was excluded for final release. For us Star Wars fans, the effect simulates the holographic transmission effect used for communications.

Here is an example with me doing the Jedi:

The effect has also become quite popular for Halloween:

And yet another one …

Listed below are the steps to do this hack.

1. Extract HoloGit.qtz from the zip file.
2. Place it on your desktop for easy access.
3. Go to photobooth in your applications folder and right click to *Show package contents*
4. Navigate to content>resources
5. Drag the HoloGit.qtz file from the desktop to this folder.
6. Locate the file *EffectsOrdering.plist* in this folder
7. Open the file with textedit
8. You should see a number of effects listed in that file. You should see user backdrop 1, user backdrop 2, and so forth in the last paragraph.
9. Replace the words *user backdrop 1* to *HoloGit*
It should look like this: /HoloGit
10. Save the file. Close all folders.
11. Open up photobooth and enjoy your newfound effect.

The complete instruction on how to do this, as well as the files needed can be found here. The forum thread also contains other user made effects.

Mac OS X Leopard now has 300 + 1 new features and counting! 🙂