I’ve wanted to experiment with miniature faking for a little while now, but have only recently gotten around to actually trying. I absolutely love this form of photography as it’s somewhat of a way to put places, no matter how large they may seem in real life, into perspective. It’s almost as if some supreme higher being picked up a camera and started shooting the world we live in.

Like I mentioned in the beginning of this post, I’ve wanted to try this technique for a while now, and at first I was considering springing for a tilt-shift lens, however, said lenses are horribly expensive and therefore instantly out of my budget range, so the next best thing was to mimic the look of tilt-shift miniatyre faking during the post processing of the shots.

At first I was going to use a dedicated website for doing this, however, I was quickly disappointed by the low resolution images the site spat out, so I decided to come up with my own workflow for achieving the same effect, or as close as possible, in Photoshop.

I’m sure there already are quite a few tutorials out there on achieving this effect using different techniques, but I like experimenting so I set out to try and replicate the look without relying on any tutorials.

The workflow turned out to be quite straight forward, actually. The first thing I did was making a new layer, filling it with pure black, and create a series of white gradients on top of this layer, matching the elements of the scene, such as variations in the angle of the terrain and objects such as bushes.
I then merged all these elements together and moved this black and white layer into the alpha channel of the image.

Following this, I proceeded to give the image a pass through Photoshop’s lens blur filter, using the black and white mask I made earlier to control the focus of the filter.

The final step was to tweak the saturation and exposure to add a bit of punch to the image while heightening fake feel I were after.

These images turned out to be quite fun to make, so I bet this won’t be the last time I do this. I guess the biggest problem with these kind of images is to find a location to shoot from, as you need quite a bit of height in order to do this, regardless, you never know when you might find yourself in a position to get shots like these so who knows? There might be a followup on this later.

Tags: Photography, Photoshop, tilt-shift