Lens blur fun

[BigKuba]

I've seen folks use this PS trick to make fake miniature cityscapes (like so), but I was playing around with photos from a recent road trip and and found that you can get cool results with more naturey-y subjects. What do you think?

[dbp]

edit: I like yours by the way. Good job.

Fake tilt shifts are a fun little PS trick and quite easy. Here are a few I did a while back. These are not my photos, btw...

[advres]

If done correctly they look good. If done incorrectly they look like shit.

[BigKuba]

Yeah, I've found that many of the ones in the link I included go way overboard with the blur. I've tried to limit it and make the depth field more reflective of the topography, i.e. more than just a left-to-right or top-to-bottom gradient.

dbp -- I think I've seen that one with the waterfall and bridge before...

[dbp]

dbp -- I think I've seen that one with the waterfall and bridge before...

Yeah, I had seen it before too. I was trying to emulate the one I saw.

[Roo]

How is this done?

[BigKuba]

PS has a filter called Lens Blur that emulates an exaggerated depth of field. You need to specify a depth field -- a separate grayscale channel in which the darkness of each pixel denotes its distance from the lens, e.g. black is closest, white is farthest, with the various shades of gray in the middle. You can pick which shade of gray denotes the "in focus" distance and the total amount of blur.

So in my first photo, the part in focus is white in the depth field, and the rocks behind it are a gray, fading to black as you go to the left.