Fake Tilt-Shift

If you want to make a photo look tilt-shift but don't have the money for a fancy lens or the skill to make one, just using photoshop can get a pretty nice technique.

Original image:


1. Enter Quick Mask Mode.

2. Select the Gradient tool. Set it to Reflected Gradient Mode.

3. Decide what part of the photo you want to be in focus. Start drawing a vertical line there, and finish with where you want it to be fully out of focus. On my photo, I draw a line from near the feet of the man wearing a white shirt to the people on bikes.

4. Go back to Standard Mode (unclick Quick Mask).

5. Go to Filter> Blur> Lens Blur. Check to see whether the section you want to be in focus looks right. The default settings work pretty well but you can mess with them if you want. Hit OK if you are satisfied.

6. Get out of the selection (CMD+D).

7. Miniatures are usually brightly painted, so it helps to kick up the saturation by using Hue/Saturation. I set it to +57.

8. My photo became a little yellow when the saturation was changed, so I kicked that down a little in Color Balance but setting it more towards blue.

9. Increasing the contrast can also help the objects in the picture look more fake. I used Curves.

And voila!




Here is a nice tutorial that has screenshots of this whole process.

If you are feeling handy, you can make your own tilt-shift lens. It does mean buying a cheap lens and superglueing it to a plunger... so don't do this with your normal lens! Here is an example from Instructables, but a quick google search will turn up all sorts of instructions.

Also, here is one of my favorite tilt-shift videos: