Emulating the Tilt-Shift effect in Photoshop(Tip for Adobe Photoshop)

          What some vacation pictures actually show is insignificant cant, but they still bring back memories. Therefore, some photos are meant to be kept even though they might not be amongst the best ones you’ve shot. Here’s a way to enhance them using Photoshop.

          Photograph differently: While there are several ways to breathe life into ordinary photos, one of them is the tilt shift effect. This effect can be obtained using specific lenses with cameras, but they are rather expensive. The effect essentially focuses on a specific area in the frame, hence sharpening it, and blurs the rest of the frame while increasing the depth of field. Apart from using expensive tilt-shift lenses, the effect can be obtained using a reasonably priced Lens baby lens too. The best option to capture such scenes is to shoot them from a height.

          Optimizing on a PC: The tilt-shift effect can be emulated in Photoshop by using the Gaussian Blur filter. Open the shot image in Photoshop, choose the Gaussian Blur filter from the menu and set the brush radius to ten pixels. Now use the selection tool and select an area (perhaps the center) that you think
should appear to be sharp. Rectangles or ellipses are suitable shapes to make a selection. From the options bar, click ‘Correct Edges’ and create a ‘Feather’ with 60-70 pixels. Now create a ‘Level’ adjustment layer and drag this under the ‘Unsharp Layer’. Increase the ‘Hue/ Saturation’ and Brightness/Contrast’ for the Unsharp layer to an extent such that the picture appears deliberately artificial. Now let’s add another vignette,
so go to Image | Canvas size and set the Height and Weight to 110 percent. Now let’s add an oval selection on a new layer, so select ‘Feather’ while having a 90 pixel brush. Here, clicking ‘Inverse’ will select the corners of the image. Fill these corners with black and reduce the opacity of the layer. Finally reduce the canvas size to 90 percent.

source: chip plus