I’ve been having some fun playing with the lens blur effect in Photoshop using the Tilt Shift Lens process. If done with the right photo, it really tricks your eye into thinking the scene is a miniature model.

The effect has become quite popular on flickr with over 1700 photos posted to the Tilt-shift miniature fakes Group Photo Pool. These are a few of my favorites. It’s fun to see what scenes people have tried, that really work well here. Some I wouldn’t have expected to work with this effect yet they are very interesting.

A tutorial to the basics of this process is posted here. I’ve found that you can take the effect even further for a more realistic effect:
- Duplicate the layer before you apply the effect
- After applying the blur add a mask to the top layer
- using the paintbrush, mask out areas that bleed into the blur area that should stand out (example here).

It’s super simple so give it a try. I’d love to see what you come up with.