Tilt Shift Faking Minatures

[teaking]

This is a picture of a full sized small plane taken at the science museum in manchester, which I have applied a tilt shift effect to, just thought it may be fun to post something a bit different.

[leonaashlee]

I don't know what tilt shift is, although I've seen it on here before, so I am unable to comment on that, but nice shot.

[Thanatoz]

TIlt shift is fun!!
Good effort on the plane! I played with some of my pics with this effect to Cool to play with huh

Heres some info on it Leon:
Tilt-shift photography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[inkista]

Tilt-shift refers to "tilt-shift" lenses, which are a way of incorporating lens movements with an SLR (this comes from bellows/view camera photography, where you can tilt/shift the lens and film planes to get certain DoF and perspective effects).

The toy-miniature effect can be done in-camera with a tilt-shift lens, but since they're really expensive, it's also faked in post-processing by using a gradient mask and a blur filter. Using blur to "reduce" the DoF mimics using upwards tilt with a tilt-shift or view camera, and looks much like the tiny DoF you get in macro shots, which is why your brain reads it as a shot of a miniature object.

The main difficulties in achieve the effect are that your gradient mask has to approximate how the out of focus blur would occur from object distance. Using a horizontal gradient across the frame means that what's at the bottom of the frame has to be closer to you than what's at the top. This isn't always the case with the objects in the photo. So, sometimes, a depth mask might be more effective than a simple gradient. And the scene has to be the kind that you're used to seeing from macro photos of miniature objects. These type of shots work best if you're using an overhead view, and the subject matter is something you know is made into miniatures/toys.

[equilution]

Too cool, teaking. I wish I could figure out how to do this. Is this a lens, or an effect created in PP? Thanks. Great shot!

Jim

[Sparkie1263]

I have two I did on my flickr site. Looks good but think it would look better if you wern't so close. Did you use PS to do it?

Frank

[inkista]

Originally Posted by equilution

Too cool, teaking. I wish I could figure out how to do this. Is this a lens, or an effect created in PP?

It can be done with a lens (like Vincent LaForet with Canon TS-E lenses) or view camera (like Olivo Barbieri shooting large-format), but it's most commonly done as a post-processing thing. I linked to two different tutorials in my earlier post. But if that's too much work, you can use this: tiltshiftmaker.com - Transform your photos into tilt-shift style miniatures

And hey, if you have an iPhone, you can use tiltshift generator.

[teaking]

Yeah to be honest I agree it wasnt the best scene to use would have been much better with something from above to add that perspective

I actualy used a vector graphics package called inkscape to do this as I usualy do illustration work. There is a Screencasters site two guys run it and they do lots of tutorials this was one of them screencasters.heathenx.org » Blog Archive » Episode 099

The video on that page will run straight through the process and although it is a inkscape tutorial Im sure the same process could be used in PS using layers

I hope this gives you enough inormation to play around with the effect your selves and just have alot of fun with it