Tilt-shift Post Processing

[dugarner]

A friend of ours, who is an amazing amateur photographer, posted some great photos today of his hometown using a technique called tilt-shift. He mentioned it was post-processing, or digitally rendered.

I had never heard of this technique---I'm still working on trying to get a good Lensbaby effect from PSE---but I figured I could learn how to do it. I googled it, and boy, is it easy! It makes things look like toys or models. It works best on a picture with a lot of depth---low things, high things, and lots of detail. Cityscapes, cars, and buildings do well. I thought someone might have just the right pictures to try this with.



This is an example, though the original photo is a scanned APS picture. It is not an ideal choice for the effect.

Here's another one:



On this one, I just did the road, two of the cars, the near trees, and all the lampposts. Again, not a great choice. But I'm excited to start working on taking more pictures that this would work with.

If anyone has had experience working with this technique, I'd love to see some of your pictures, or hear about how you tweaked the process!

Sarah

This is very interesting to me! I can't wait to hear more! TFS!

[jazzmatazz]

VERY cool! Could you provide a link to the tutorial you used, Sarah? Thanks ... and thanks for sharing!

[dugarner]

Hi there!

I googled it again, and came up with this:

http://www.tiltshiftphotography.net/...p-tutorial.php

This is for CS3.

However, for PSE, it's just as easy, though maybe not as refined. I need to work on it some more. But this is a starting point.

1. Open your photograph.

2. Make a duplicate layer of your photograph in the layers palette.

3. Click the adjustment layer icon in the layers palette, create an adjustment layer (I usually pick hue and saturation), and move it between the two
duplicate layers. (This is to make a "fake" layer mask.)

4. Click on the top layer and click CTRL+G to group it with the adjustment layer below.

5. With the top layer focused, apply a gaussian blur (your preference, I chose 5-6 for the baseball picture).

6. Click on the adjustment layer, press D to set your foreground color to black, and choose the brush tool.

7. Pick a soft-edged brush and paint, with the adjustment layer selected in your layers palette, anywhere you want the picture to be in focus. If you make a mistake, press X to switch the foreground color to white and paint over your mistakes. Press D to switch the foreground color back to black and keep going until you're pleased with the effect. Just be sure to stay on your adjustment layer.

8. You can adjust the opacity of the gaussian blur layer to increase/decrease the bluriness.

9. I read somewhere else that it helps to kick up the saturation and contrast, since models and toys are usually bright with sharp, unrealistic edges.

Let me know if this makes sense! I think this is a really neat effect.

Sarah

[jazzmatazz]

Cool, Sarah! Thank you soooooo much!

[AbbyG]

Yes, I love this effect!! I got an action for it, just can't remember where -- let me look and I'll post it later. But in the mean time this is what I did with it:

[AbbyG]

I found where I think I got it: Action Central:

http://www.atncentral.com/

[dugarner]

That designer has some neat actions, but unfortunately, this is one that doesn't run in Elements! I have to work on doing it by hand.