Miniature Venice

A few months ago I posted some shots of the view from the Campanile in Venice. kbfotografix and myself had thought at the time that some of them might suit the tilt shift effect thats all the rage at the moment. I have occasionally used this before, usually following this guide, which I’ve had bookmarked for years. But I’ve recently upgraded to Photoshop CS6 which has a dedicated tilt/shift filter, which is a new addition to the blur filter tools, and thought I’d try it out on them. I’ve also recently used this on my Phone booths and Big Ben post from a few weeks ago.

This is the original image on the left.

I opened this up in Photoshop, duplicated the base layer and added the tilt shift effect, Below is a screen shot of the basic settings applied. You can see how much more control you have than with my older method, almost too much control! you can adjust the angle of the tilt, how much is in focus and how quickly focus falls off either side of your in focus section. Blur amount and distortion are there and also there as are bokeh effects, which I think are best suited to night shots.

As you can see this has thrown the tower out of focus, I want that to be sharp so using a layer mask (remember how I copied the base layer?) I can reveal the sharp, in focus tower on the base layer.

You can kinda see how I’ve masked it. I’ve also decided that the focus fall off at the bottom of the image was too much so have done another tilt/shift layer to the original and masked out the top of it.

Finally, using Nik Efex Viveza, I’ve boosted the saturation and contrast to give it a more toy like feel.

Here is the final image, to be honest I don’t think it’s added much to the original image, if anything at all. If I’d been serious about it I would’ve started this from scratch using my original RAW image instead of an already processed image. But it was a nice experiment.

And here’s another one from the same series which was an easier process (no masking)and has probably worked a bit better.