I was watching TV the other night and I saw a commercial for an insurance company that intrigued me. They had placed a camera at a high vantage point over a house and then filmed it with a tilt / shift lens. The result of the lens settings made the whole scene appear to be a filmed miniature model complete with tiny people.
Though the technique isn’t new in photography, I hadn’t noticed it before in video or film. The tilt / shift effect when properly applied renders selected sharpness to a fairly narrow band of a scene causing radical soft focus in both the foreground and background. This combination soft focused fore and back plus the higher high camera placement combine to create the effect of miniatures.
I was curious about how to create the effect in still images and I found a ton of information online. There is even a Flickr group dedicated to the effect. After browsing the many how-to’s, the method I settled on was pretty easy to do in Photoshop.
I did have a hard time finding a suitable image to work with from my own image files. The effect works best when the camera is at a higher elevation than the subject and the subject is pretty much centered in the shot. Also nice to have are strong vertical elements to lend height and scale. Without going into an extensive search, I found this image:
After opening the file in Photoshop, I determined where I wanted the central focus to be in the image – what element would I isolate. Then I clicked the “Quick Mask” mode (on the tool palette, that’s the darker rectangle with the white circle in it towrd the bottom).
Then I selected the “Gradient” tool and in that tool’s control panel I selected the “Radiant Gradient”. Placing the cursor at the point I wanted to have in sharp focus, I clicked and drew a line straight up to the top of the frame. A red gradient mask appeared over my image.
After creating the mask it was time to get out of Quick Mask mode and back to standard edit (on the tool palette click the other rectangle with the light background and the white circle). Then all I had to do was select Filter/Blur/Lens Blur and a editing box opens up. From this point move the sliders back and forth to create the strength of the effect that you want. For my example a blur radius setting of 58 worked the best:
(Click the image to see a larger view)
After creating the blur effect you want, click OK and you’re finished! Crop the image if you think it will help, plus boosting contrast and color saturation can add a more surreal miniature world feel to the image too. Play with the effect, adjust it to your own taste and have fun!
