not sure if tilt-shift truly delivers narrow depth in the same way that macro does, but these fake-outs look like fake-outs. look at the black car on the right; its doors are sharp but the roof edge is soft, because the band of focus didn’t reach that high. but true narrow depth-of-field would have rendered the roof as sharp as the door, with the contour of the car standing out as sharper than whatever was behind it.

No?

As far as I know, tiltshift has zero to do with z-depth/depth of field. The effect certainly asks your brain to assume the depth being suggested by the blurred areas is real (hence the miniature effect), but the technique isn’t actually achieving that. It’s just blurring the top and bottom of the frame..

Anybody got more on that?

Which is sort of funny, really. This technique only works because the audience expects its outcome. Thus it can reasonably be called a “fake of a fake”.

No. I thought that these types of photos were of models before I ever read an explanation.

@#7: That’s not a tilt-shift lens and won’t give the same results.

@#22: A real tilt-shift lens has everything to do with depth of field among other things. It’s only the fake effect in this post that is just blurring the top and bottom of the frame. Or is that what you were referring to?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt-shift_photography

You can do more than create the “miniature” effect with a good tilt-shift lens.

I’m not trying to sound superior or critical – if anything, the opposite. I think maybe it’s like Magic Eye photos – some people just can’t see them. You take a photo, run some algorithm on it, and some people go “wow, that’s really cool” and others just go “huh?”

I think the *idea* of making real things look like miniatures is a fun one, but I’ve never seen a photo which I think achieves it.

You’d get real depth of field. Choose the focal depth in post processing, or even modify the focal depth interactively as the video is playing.

… off to look for some cheap webcams and a really big usb hub …

Higher quality version here, (30 MB, right-click, save as*) advised, as vimeo’s compression kind of messes with the blur effect..

* I vouch for the safety of the link :)

Sounds something like SmallGantics’ super-secret 10-planes of DoF + compositors technique.

“Because of non-disclosure and proprietary reasons, I cannot disclose our exact technique, but I can explain the many issues posed.“

I had a go at the same photo, bascially repeatedly using photoshop’s ‘blur more’ starting at with the furtherest objects then adding things that were closer and closer to the car to the selection (and then did the same from the front).

I did the bit around the car frame manually and fiddled with the levels and saturation. And did a bit of extra blurring at the back, though now I look it’s still a lot less than the one above.

So I was going for fake wide-aperture.

Because the typical ‘model’ shot of a city of whatever is from above, front=close and back=far away, just blurring the top and bottom would often be realistic.

There is an appealing quaint quality to just doing it that way for other photos, though.

http://flickr.com/photos/19thavenue/3179270585/

A tilt-shift lens allows you to create an artificially shallow depth-of-field by tilting the lens (shifting it is not involved). Everything closer and farther from the focal plane quickly becomes blurred and our brain is fooled into thinking it’s a macro picture. Pretty neat.

What’s lame about many fake TS pictures is that since the blurring that simulates the dept-of-field is applied indiscriminately above and below a region of “in-focus” sharpness, and “tall” things that are in the focal plane get (incorrectly) blurred at the top and bottom of the picture.

So it looks fake not because it’s tilted (tilting is fake, but it’s also cool) but because it’s poorly simulated, violates laws of optics and thus looks photoshopped.

Note that you can pick photos where a simplistic TS simulation more or less works, or you could do a more sophisticated blurring (rather than simply picking a horizontal band.) The later involves work and is not something TiltShiftMaker.com provides.

I suppose that is what I meant, unintentionally. Where I was coming from, was: I’ve seen TiltShifts of huge scenes, featuring focal-point/DoF way longer/deeper than what I thought achievable with a hand-held sized lense. (Some very likely featured in the related links, above.)

Now that i thnk of it, any number of these could have been fake TiltShift rather than real, lense-based, so I may have reasoned the limits of the technique to fit the physics I was observing..

My favorite is the motion TS used near the end of John August’s The Nines, especially because I get to see a lot of neighborhoods I’m familiar with given the treatment.

Re: the other points. The focus (pardon the pun) of the application is to provide a fun way to try the effect on your photos. If you require more powerful image editing application, you will most likely own a copy of Photoshop etc. already.

Magma6
(and sorry for my poor English)