Make Light Real

Neil February 6th, 2008

 

Create a Faux Tilt shift Effect in photoshop, originally uploaded by Neil Shot with Sigma 24mm 1.8 on Canon 1Ds mII.

If to understand the light we must know the darkness.

Then to understand the power of sharpness we must fully emphasize the soft.

Enter the wonder of Tilt Shift lenses, but with the wonder comes the price of their increased difficulty to use.

Oh you say, photoshop can do that fast and dirty. Sure there’s a great plugin called Melancholytron, that’ll do it in a flash.

But at it’s most fundamental, a basic photoshop action will only add blur - not emphasize sharpness over a 3 dimensional plane. Once you’re accustomed to looking at real tilt-shift images the extra blur methods of simulation won’t interest you much.

The emphasis on the 3 dimensional is a great way to improve your photographic thinking and seeing.

To take this thinking to the next level you’ll need to take a closeup look at a real tilt-shift lens’ image reproduction so you know where you should go in photo shop: Example 1

Here you’ll see the plane of focus is shallow enough and tilted enough to have their faces in focus - but their shoulders blurry…but notice the bokeh (blur produced by the optics of a lens) see how the reflections are in a teardrop shape? Now that’s funky - but also organic and it a good part of what gives the images their frentic tonal energy.

Photoshop steps

So starting again in photoshop, you’ll actually need to shoot two (or more) images at differing distances of focus. A tripod could help but I never have one and just shoot hand held from about the same perspective. Here is one of my final images shot with a standard 50mm lens merged from more than one image.

She was pointing at the flowers going up and I shot that image sharp, then pulled in some of the focus on the falls.

1. The basic step is to make a new layer in PhotoShop,
2. put your second focal distance on it and create a layer mask.
3. Now you might at first think that a simple gradient blur will work on that mask to push the focus around, but it rarely does for me. You’ll want to create a custom mask, probably painted in. You can start with a gradient, then paint over it for a quick start.
4. Focus your attention on drawing connections between foreground and or background elements using the two layers. Add in any other elements or additional layers with the Lens Blur filter applied in differing amounts.

Voila - now it’s done and is close to looking realistic and or magical - your choice.

Photoshop’s Lens Blur Filter - second best method

Well if you didn’t have time to shoot two images and only have one….you can resort to using Photoshop’s lens blur filter. The benefit of using the Lens-Blur filter is that it actually creates a bokeh like distortion instead of a flat, and low contrast Gaussian blur technique.

The level of artistry that you achieve using the lens blur filter will be equal to the level of artistry you put into creating a ‘depth map’. To create a depth map simply create a layer mask. The layer mask can be used by the Lens Blur filter to apply a faux sort of depth which is adjustable by the slider titled “Blur Focal Distance” to create a nice mask for youself just Gaussian blur a copy layer to preview what areas you really want your blur to be applied. Move that layer mask back to a layer with all the original sharpness and apply your lens blur filter.

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• Creativity , Inspiration , On Art , Photoshop , how to , learning