Tilt-shift photography is a technique used by photographers that typically involves a special lens which rotates and shifts the image plane. The end result is an incredibly gorgeous image in which the life-size subject looks like a miniature, or small-scale model. If you don’t have a super-spendy tilt-shift lens, don’t worry. This tutorial will walk you through the steps for creating tilt-shift images in Photoshop from regular photographs.
To start off, here are some samples I created from my images so you’re familiar with the look of the effect:
Before you begin you want to make sure to have a good looking image, so adjust your white balance, contrast, saturation, levels, and curves before starting. Then, switch to quick mask mode (located under the foreground/background color in the tools palette, or hit Q for a shortcut) and select the gradient tool. For this specific image, I used the radial gradient, but you can use whichever is appropriate for the area you want to isolate. Drag the gradient tool so that the subject area you want to stay in focus is highlighted in red.
Then exit out of quick mask, and dancing ants will show up around your subject area.
Select Filter >> Blur >> Lens Blur, and a dialog box will pop up, giving you options for the appearance of the blur. The Radius option is a good one to familiarize yourself with. Notice that, as you minimize the radius of the blur, the background comes more into focus. As you maximize the blur, the background blurs out. When you are satisfied with the effect, hit Ok to apply the blur. Deselect (Ctrl/Cmd +D) to get rid of the dancing ants.
And that’s all there is to it! To further enhance the tilt-shift look, you might want to heighten the saturation of your image. I played around with this one a bit after applying the lens blur. Here’s the final outcome:
There are lots of resources to learn more about tilt-shift photography–Flickr is a great place to check out other people’s work.
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Comments
10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?