a while back i wrote a post about tilt shift photography and how easy it was to create the tilt shift look in photoshop by simply using a couple of filters and masks. of course you can go out and buy a tilt shift lens and every photo can have that look, but they are kind of expensive. since a few friends asked me to show them, i’ll outline the technique right here.

step 1: choose the right photograph
even though you can do this to every photo, not all photographs work the same way. find a photo that you can isolate a specific object in the foreground or middle ground. this will greatly accentuate the effect. i chose a shot i took in athens of the temple of hephaestus from the areopagus.

temple of hephaestus

step 2: duplicate the background: self explanatory

tilt shift 2

step 3: add blur filters to upper layer
here comes the good part. tilt shift is all about specific focus and particularly how the lens and film plane would line up in large format view cameras (a great explanation of both the camera and the technique here). to that end i like to add two and maybe 3 blur filters to tilt shift tests. first i start with a ‘lens blur’ filter. this filter allows me to mimic a lens iris and even control specualar highlight for the bokeh effect. i may then add a radial blur of 1 or 2 % depending on the strength/look of the effect i want.

tilt shift 3

step 4: mask out the ‘focus’ area
i then make a layer mask on the upper blurred area and horizontally select with the rectangular marquee the object of focus from one end of the canvas to the other. i usually blur the selection around 40 pixels before filling it with black thus exposing the bottom ‘focused’ layer. from here you can change opacity to any of the elements. try playing around with all these filters and setting to find your own sweet spot. now let’s see if i can make an action to batch the entire process.

tilt shift 4

the final image:

temple of hephaestus_ts_final