I’m not gonny talk about all the aspects of tilt-shift-photography (tsp) here, since wikipedia knows so much better. In fact, i’m only talking about one side effect of tilt-shifting. It’s the effect when a scene looks like, as if it’s taken from a miniature world.

At the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to apply this effect to any photo you’d like within 5 minutes.

First of all well need some photo to manipulate. I’ll promise, that this is the hardest part of all. To make it a bit easier for you, i’ve chosen to search some on flickr. Just to clarify this one: i’m not gonna say you should „steal“ nice photos from flickr or similar ressources. Respect the work some other person did, i only did choose this one, cause it has all we need to learn this technique, and it’s a very nice one.
So here it is:

Well this is obiously a very nice picture on it’s own. Plus: it has nearly all we need to make a new mini-world.

Simply start by downloading this picture (will open a new window/ tab) save it to your desktop, and open it with photoshop.
On a sidenote: i’m working with a german version of photoshop, so you might have difficulties to find all menus etc. which i later will show you in the images, therefor i’ve tried to describe all menus and shortcuts in english. I hope you won’t find that too crazy now let’s start shopping.

Step 0:

First of all we might want to duplicate the layer, and since there’s no standard shortcut to do this, we simply press Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. That’ll give us a new layer so we later can simply switch back to the original version.

Of yourse there are other ways to do that, but that one’s the fastest.

Step 1:

fig.1

Select the lasso (see fig.1) in your tool-palette (Key: L). Doublecheck that we’ve not selected poligon~ or magnetic-lasso.
Now that we’ve selected the right tool – namely the lasso – we can go on to …

Step 2:

Now we start selecting that part of our photo, which shall be the „minimized“ part (fig.2). Mostly that’s (some) object(s) which should be really sharp and are positioned not too far in front but also not too far in the background of our photo.

fig.2

Step 3:

Now we tweak our selection a bit, because our selection has a hard edge which won’t look too good in the end. So we press ALT + CTRL + D (yes that’s alot of keys ) and we are prompted to set the amount of pixels we want to blur our selection. Let’s choose 40px for now.
The resulting image will look like fig.2. Not too much difference you say, and you’re right. But when you change to mask mode by hitting Q you’ll get a good impression of what we’ve changed within this step (fig.4). The (opaque) red color stands for the area that gets masked.

fig.4

Step 4:

fig.6

We hit Q again to switch back to selection mode (we could have made some refinements here, but we just leave it as it is for the sake of simplicity). And now we’ll use a newly introduced filter since CS3: Lens Blur. Click on Filter -> Blur -> Lens Blur (fig.5) and you’ll get a dialog to tweak some settings for this filter (fig.6). You should hit the ‚invert‘-checkbox, and for radius you should get a fine result with 20. That’s all you’ll. Hit Ok and STRG + D to get rid of your selection.

Step 5:

fig.7

Press C to get the the cut tool, cause now we’ll be looking for the best section of our photo. Try to make your selection similar to fig.7. Hit Enter and your good to go.

Step 6: (optional works)

Some photos can even be more realistic/expressive when colors are a little bit exaggerated, which in this case isn’t really needed. But apllied on a photo with city scene it might give you much better results.

The resulting image should now look like this one:

That’s it, i hope you enjoyed the tutorial and you could learn something new. If you have any questions or just want to ask sth. or maybe you’ve spotted an error or just want to say hi, feel free to leave a comment.