Tilt-Shift photography is the art of making a scene look like it’s a toy, and it’s remarkably easy. You can find a ton of great examples over at the flickr pool. Today I’m going to show you how to do tilt-shift photography using a standard digital camera and photoshop.
1. Choose your shot:
This is a shot I took on a recent trip to Kyoto station. I think it’s going to be a good choice for tilt-shifting as it’s taken from fairly high up and since it has trains, it kind of looks like a model already. The quality isn’t great as I had a window pane between me, but it’s not going to matter too much as we’ll be applying lots of effects anyway.
2. Open Photoshop and make a Quickmask of the central area
Press Q to enter quickmask mode. Now, using the gradient tool (pictured left), mask out an area central in the photograph that you want to be your main scene – everything else will be blurred later. Once you’ve got a mask looking somewhat similar to the one below, press Q again to leave quickmask mode. Don’t worry if the area you selected isn’t entirely straight.
3. Add a Lens Blur:
If you’ve exited out of quickmask mode, you should now have an area selected that you want to be your central scene. Next we’re going to add a Lens Blur from the Filter -> Blur menu.
You can see the settings I used below, but I’m no expert so I do suggest you play around. Try to not make the effect too strong, though, as you still want to see the rest of the photograph as well.
4. Adjust:
Now we have our basic tilt-shifted scene, we should add some saturation, contrast and level adjustments to make it a little more “model” like.
Select Image -> Adjustments -> Hue / Saturation, and make the colours just a little more saturated, as if they had been painted. Models are always more vibrantly coloured than dull real life.
Select Image -> Adjustments -> Levels, and bring in the boundaries of the upper and lower threshold, as I’ve done below.
Select Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness / Contrast, and add a little contrast and brightness if needed.
And there you have it! Nice work! You can check out all the tilt-shifts I’ve done from Japan on my Flickr stream. Please do comment if you have suggestions, or wish to share your own work. Thanks!
