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How To – Make A Tilt & Shift Effect in 6 easy steps

by on Aug.17, 2010, under Tutorials

How To – Make A Tilt & Shift Effect on a Photo

I would like to show you how to make a very good effect to give your photos that ” Is that a toy car/boat/people?” that you have seen in magazines and posters. Without having to pay hundreds or thousands of pounds buying new Len’s for your DSLR or SLR. This is actually a extremely simple effect to achieve with photoshop.

I love doing these tutorials, because when I’m on holiday (which I was when I took this photo) I end up thinking, this would be a great photo for me to use to do this effect.

And if your wondering what a tilt and shift lens is try looking here ” Tilt & Shift Lens”. – Wikipedia

STEP 1

So the first thing you need to do is select a photo that you think might look good with this effect, I have gone for a nice boat on the sea :)

Original Image

Original Image

STEP 2

So for the next step we need to use the Quick Mask mode. We also need to make sure that we have Black & White as the colours, just like you can see in the image. Click on it and it will turn RED like in the image.

quick mask

quick mask

STEP 3

Now we need to use the Gradient Tool. We’re not actually going to paint anything with it (remember we are in Quick Mask mode).

gradient tool

gradient tool

STEP 4

Now with the gradient tool still in Quick Mask Mode, you want to make sure that you mask the area that we want to keep “in focus” and this will make sense in a bit. So if you want to give the boat the effect that its a toy boat, then its the boat that we want to keep “in focus”. As you can see in the image below.

gradient tool - mask selection

gradient tool - mask selection

STEP 5

Ok, so now you have the bit you want “in focus” we no longer need to be in Quick Mask mode any more. So we can deselect quick mask mode.

deselect quick mask

deselect quick mask

And this will then leave you with something that looks like this below. As you can see the selection area is above and below the boat, NOT THE ACTUAL BOAT. The quick mask mode we used earlier with the RED bar across the middle was basically saying “we don’t want this bit in the mask”

selection area

selection area

STEP 6

The next step in the tutorial is where the magic comes alive. We need the Lens Blur Filter.

Filter -> Blur -> Lens Blur

Lens Blur Filter

Lens Blur Filter

The most important bit here is the Radius slider.  In this photo 40 works fine for me, but you WILL need to experiment with this to get the desired effect.

Lens Blur Radius

Lens Blur Radius

FINAL IMAGE

And hopefully if you’ve followed this far, you will have achieved the desired effect like below.

Hopefully you are thinking, hey actually that does look like a toy boat in the sea :) !

final image

final image

If you like this, please share it with others and let everyone know!

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