making things look "toy-ish"

[choudhrysaab]

hi ... i've seen quite a few pictures on Flickr where everything/everyone looks like a miniature/toy like in the picture and these pictures usually have a "tiltshift" tag attached to them.
question - is tiltshift a type of lens that makes everything look miniature or is it a post process?

 

[musicaleCA]

Yep, tilt-shift is a type of lens (Canon's are marked TS-E). By tilting the lens, you can selectively focus part of the frame, that is, putting the top and bottom of the frame out-of-focus. (Shifting the lens allows you to correct for perspective distortion.)

However, you don't need a tilt-shift lens to achieve this. You can just as easily use a graduated mask on a lens-blurred duplicate layer of your image in Photoshop to create a similar effect.

 

[Big Mike]

Tilt/shift are movements that can be done on certain cameras or lenses. Basically you are changing the orientation of the lens axis or the film plane, in relation to one another. Most view cameras (the really old school cameras with the black cape) have tilt & shift movements. For modern camera, you can buy tilt/shift lenses...but they are fairly expensive.

You can 'fake' this effect with processing. I'm sure that Google will turn up some good tutorials.

 

[choudhrysaab]

appearently there's a website that can transform the pictures into that format ... tiltshiftmaker.com - Transform your photos into tilt-shift style miniatures

 

[Samanax]

Make your own fake tilt-shift/model photographs.

 

[choudhrysaab]

Thank you again Samanax ... this is like the 5th "Thank You" I've used just on you =)