Design Pitstop

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Tilt-shift photography is the result of physically tilting the lens of a medium format camera on a small format body. The results can be astounding, and make the subject appear very tiny. But what if you don’t have all that expensive equipment? No worries, it’s perfectly easy with Adobe Photoshop!

Step 1: Choosing the Right Photo

Not just any photo will work right for a Photoshop tilt-shift job. In general, you want your photo to be taken from a high vantage point, head-on shots don’t work very well. For this example, I will use a picture I took on a somewhat cloudy day in Pittsburgh, from the 23rd floor of our hotel:

Step 2: Blurring

If we look at a tilt-shift photo, we see that part of the effect is a blurring effect. We can accomplish this using the Quickmask tool. So press Q on your keyboard to enter Quickmask mode. Now, choose your Gradient tool, set it to “Reflected Gradient”, and make a mask that looks something like this:

Don’t worry about keeping it straight or anything like that- most tilt-shift photography doesn’t work in right angles as there is a person behind the camera, not a shift-constrained mouse. But at the same time, don’t go putting it at a 45 degree angle.

Now, press Q again to exit Quickmask mode. This will leave you with a selection. Go to Filters->Blur->Lens Blur (if you are using any version of Photoshop before CS2, you can alternately go to Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur, though the effect won’t be quite as strong.) to bring up your lens blur settings. You can feel free to play around with the settings until you get your desired result. I ended up going with these settings:

And this leaves you with:

Not bad, but it still doesn’t look all that hot. What else can we do?

Step 3: Contrast and Curves

Since we want the photo to look like it was taken of a scale model, we want to intensify the light a little bit. As scale models are smaller than their physical counterparts, light reacts differently with them. We will do this using the Brightness/Contrast and Curves adjustment layers. Again, feel free to play around, and use these settings as a guideline:

And the result:

Not bad…but now it’s a bit too vibrant for the look we want. Well, that’s fixed easily. Duplicate our base layer (before the adjustment layers), bring it to the top of our layer list, add a moderate Gaussian Blur (around 7.3 px), set the mode to color about 50% Opacity. Crop as you’d like, and end with something like:

And that about does it. If you’d like to view some more tilt-shift fakery photos, check out my flickr photostream or the flickr photopool.

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Tags: effects, photography, photoshop, tutorials

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