Image processing in Tilt-Shift style. Tilt-Shift: What is it? The lens that makes everything look like a toy

Many have met more than once in the open spaces world wide web interesting photos cities, streets, construction sites, parks and squares made in an unusual style. They look like mock-ups of real objects. People look like toy soldiers, cars seem to be made of plastic and placed on a model street.

This is called Tilt / Shift (Tilt / Shift) effect. It is achieved by creating a specific blur (the depth of the sharply depicted space) and bright coloring of the image.

There are two ways to implement this effect. The first is the use of a special Tilt-Shift lens. The second is image processing in graphics editor. We will not consider the principles of photographing the Tilt-Shift lens, but we will get a little acquainted with its purpose and features. This is necessary for a better understanding of the mechanism for creating and processing a snapshot.

What is a Tilt-Shift Lens?

Let's deal with the name first. Tilt means tilt and Shift means shift. Tilt-Shift lens can rotate around its axis and tilt at different angles.

Shift (Shift) lens helps a lot when shooting architecture. It allows you to take pictures without optical distortion. Surely, many have come across "littered" walls that narrow towards the center of the frame. The following shot shows a vivid example of distortion (perspective) and illustrates its correction in a graphics editor:

• A picture taken by a camera with a conventional lens;
• The guides show how littered the walls are;
• With the help of transformation, the perspective is corrected. The guides are now vertical;
• The picture is cropped and we get a photo with the correct perspective.
• Using a Tilt-Shift lens allows you to initially take pictures with the correct perspective, as in the fourth paragraph.

How it works?

Using a normal lens to capture the entire building in the frame, the camera needs to be tilted. The matrix is ​​at an angle to the building itself, and because of this, distortion occurs. Lens shift allows you to hold the camera vertically. The principle of operation of the Tilt-Shift lens is clearly demonstrated by the following screenshot:

As for obtaining a specific blur, the tilt (Tilt) of the lens is responsible for this. Specific depth of field (depth of field) looks good in macro and architectural photography.

How to take a tilt shift photo?

We are not going to talk about architectural photography with the right perspective. Most people associate the concept of Tilt-Shift with pictures of real objects that look like toys. Let's figure out how to take a picture, which later (after processing) will look exactly like this.

Have you ever seen models of streets or parks? From what position did you look at them? Most likely from above. A shot with the Tilt-Shift effect should also be taken from a vantage point that gives an overhead view of the area.

Models are usually installed indoors. The light from the lamps gives hard shadows. It is this street lighting that will be ideal for creating a Tilt-Shift image.

In photography, it is not desirable to have a large number of complex objects. Airplane shots of entire cities will not look like a mock-up, as it would take many years to create. The simpler the picture, the easier it is to deceive our minds into believing that this is not a real city, but just a model with toy cars, people and animals.

For clarity, just compare the two pictures. The first is a view of the city of Kharkiv from a height of 26 floors (about 90 meters high), and the second is a snapshot of the construction site from tower crane all in the same Kharkov on Freedom Square (height - 40 meters).

Both images cover a large area, but the second image has much less detail.

Pictures of sports competitions taken from the stands (boxing, tennis, football, hockey, etc.) look very good. The main thing is that there should be a field, players and as few stands as possible in the frame. It is desirable to blur the stands that are in the frame, leaving only the main subjects sharp. How to do this, we will consider further.

tilt shift effect in photoshop

The latest version of Photoshop CS6 has a special blur filter called "Tilt-Shift" or in some translations "Tilt and Shift". It is located in the menu Filter -> Blur -> Tilt-shift (Filter -> Blur -> Tilt-Shift).

Let's take a look at the processing step by step.

Open the appropriate picture in the program. If there are flaws in the photo, then they should be removed before creating the Tilt-Shift effect. You may need to crop the image, correct perspective, reduce noise, or remove unnecessary objects with a clone brush.

After your picture is ready, create a copy of it (Ctrl + J) and work with it. This will allow you to return to the beginning if something goes wrong. Next, go to the menu Filter -> Blur, and select Tilt-Offset. A filter window, not quite typical for older versions of Photoshop, will open. It looks like this:

The panel on the right contains the settings for the filter and blur effects. On the top panel - filter management. In the image area are placed "pins" - the centers of the filters, and markup. The markup can be changed by dragging the lines with the mouse and rotating them around the pin axis.

Consider the settings:

• Focus- percentage indicator of the degree of blurring of the central point. 10% is the original sharpness of the image. In order to understand the principle of operation - just try changing this parameter.
• Save mask in channels- this option causes the program to save the gradient mask that we will create with markup. The mask will be saved in the channels tab for later use.
• High quality- Apply better blur.
• View- this option allows you to view in real time the effect of the filter on the image.
• Arrow- removes all pins from the image field.
• Blur- degree of blur.
• Distortion- Adds slight distortion in the blur zone.
• Symmetrical distortion- the name speaks for itself.
• light bokeh- this setting controls the lightening intensity of areas in a given range of colors in the blur zone.
• bokeh color- controls bokeh color.
• light range- indicates the range of tones, the clarification of which will be carried out.

Let's start processing.

Let's place the "pin" in the center of the composition. Each shot requires individual settings for marking blur areas. I rotated the field of interest so that it runs along the street, leaving the facade of the building with good sharpness. I blurred the road and the roof.

A blur of 15 pixels is enough for my shot. We don't need distortion or blur effects. Leave the values ​​at zero.

To view a picture without guides, you need to press (Ctrl + H) - easy to remember, associating the letter "H" with the hide command (eng. Hide). To return the markup, press the key combination again.

If everything is in order, click "OK". This button is on the top bar.

If your version of Photoshop doesn't have the Tilt-Offset filter, you can create the markup using a gradient mask. Switch to the Quick Mask "Q" mode, select the gradient fill tool, adjust the black and white gradient and fill it. By disabling the mask mode, you will see a selection. Now apply any blur filter to the image. Best suited is Blur at Shallow Depth of Field.

Let's add contrast and saturation to the image.

It is convenient to increase the contrast using curves. Add an adjustment layer and slightly lower the lower part of the curve, and slightly raise the upper one. See what it looks like for me:

The picture has become more contrast, and the shadows are sharper. Remember what we said about shadows at the very beginning? Some parts of the picture are too dark. Take a black brush with soft edges, about 50% opacity and go over the mask in problem areas.

Now let's make the colors not so natural. In a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, increase the saturation value to about +30, +40, depending on the situation. I put +36.

Why increase saturation?

AT real world, such bright colors are not found in everyday life. Most often, we see such colors in something toy, decorated at the factory or by the hands of the creator of the layout.

Exposure alignment

This completes the creation of the Tilt-Shift effect, but our processing continues, since in my case the picture turned out to be dark. Let's add another adjustment layer. This time it will be "Levels". The histogram clearly shows dips in light and dark tones. I moved both sliders to the center, closer to the beginning of the histogram plot, and moved the middle one to the left to brighten the shadows on the trees. The building is illuminated. With a soft, translucent, black brush, I outlined the overexposed areas, thereby weakening the effect of the adjustment layer in problem areas.

Alternative Methods for Creating a Tilt-Shift Effect

Photoshop is not the only program that allows you to implement the Tilt-Shift effect. A utility from Artensoft called Tilt Shift Generator allows you to quickly create pictures with the appropriate effect. Its settings are not much different from Photoshop's. The only drawback is the inability to rotate the area of ​​the sharply depicted space. At the same time, the program has advanced bokeh settings. Bokeh intensity can even be adjusted separately for the foreground and background.

The program is paid, so before buying it, think about how often you will create pictures with the Tilt-Shift effect. Do you need an application that will perform one single function. If not, then look at free online image editors.

Online photo editing

In addition to desktop applications, there are free online editors for creating a Tilt-Shift effect.

TiltShift Generator

The TiltShift Generator app allows you to create both linear and radial blurs. In addition, there are a number of standard settings that are needed to give the image a Tilt-Shift effect. There are no bokeh settings in the editor, but the developers have added a vignetting function, which is not typical for Tilt-Shift shots.

TiltShiftMaker

TiltShiftMaker is another online application to create a Tilt-Shift effect. What distinguishes it from TiltShift Generator is its advanced bokeh settings and faster operation speed.

Now you know what Tilt-Shift is, its nature, essence and principle of creation. Using the Tilt-Shift effect in photo processing greatly expands the boundaries of creativity. Every photographer will find something useful in this. Choose a more convenient processing method for yourself and go for it. The world is waiting for your creations.

Video with Tilt-Shift effect

Article made to order

At the disposal of photographers, I must admit, there are quite a few useful tools that allow you to solve completely different photographic tasks. We need some pieces of glass and pieces of iron at every shooting, others are in demand much less frequently. There are also rarely used devices, but it is difficult to do without them.

A tilt-shift lens can also be called such an infrequently used photographic product. Tilt-shift (tilt-shift) optics (the word tilt is translated from English as "offset", and the word "shift" is written right on your keyboard) allows you to control the perspective, which is a real find, for example, when photographing architecture. This effect manifests itself due to the shift of the optical group of lenses relative to the plane of the matrix or film. Recall that in architectural photography it is extremely important to keep the plane of the photosensitive element strictly parallel to the facade of the building, which leads to two difficulties at once. Firstly, half of the frame becomes uninformative (except for the mother earth under the photographer's feet as a useful part of the photo); secondly, the building may simply not fit into the boundaries of the frame. If you photograph a tall object from ground level, simply by fitting it into the frame of the frame, then a characteristic blockage of the walls is inevitable. And if our eye (or rather, the brain) successfully “corrects” these distortions in real time, then an outside observer sees just untidy pictures in which the house “falls”, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa can envy the curvature of straight walls in reality.

Of course, a smart photographer can easily correct perspective distortions in a graphics editor, but it's much easier to shoot "correctly" right away, without spending precious time for processing. Among the shortcomings of the "hardware" approach is the significant cost of tilt-shift optics. The popular Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II tilt-shift lens costs about 70,000 rubles, and the TS-E 45 f/2.8 from the same manufacturer costs about 50,000.

An important feature of tilt-shift lenses, which has no software analogues, should be called the ability to control the depth of field - the depth of the sharply depicted space. Some types of photography (for example, product photography) are extremely critical to this parameter. When shooting subject photography, for example, jewelry, the photographer is faced with the fact that the entire subject simply does not fit into the "sharp" area, no matter how hard the aperture is clamped. Sometimes such pictures acquire a certain artistic innuendo, but often the customer will boldly classify them as defective.

If you do not unnecessarily load readers with the theory of tilt-shift optics, formulas and other Scheimpflug rules, in reality everything turns out to be quite simple. We need to "put" the depth of field along the subject, thereby achieving an equally sharp image of the entire required area. With the development of digital technology, any photographer can easily see how the depth of field "lay down", and, if necessary, easily change the inclination of the optical axis. And you have to pay for convenience, right?

But more often than not, the photographer simply uses tilt-shift lenses to create fun effects. We will talk about these effects today.

Open the photo in Photoshop. The technique for simulating the tilt-shift effect is simple; who owns PS at a sufficient level is able to think of it himself, for especially lazy photographers on the site www.tiltshiftphotography.net all actions are described in detail and step by step. Let's try to repeat. Of course, any photo is fine, but it's better to choose a subject so that the tilt-shift effect works for the general idea, and not against it. The result will be clearly visible on photographs of large, large-scale objects - a railway station, a building, a street. Ideally, the photograph should be taken with some inclination to the ground, from a height. As an example, I chose a photograph of St. Isaac's Cathedral, which I took from a helicopter this spring:

Now press "Q" - exit the mask mode. The red zone disappeared, the dotted selection became noticeable in the photo:

As a result of simple manipulations, the picture becomes a toy! The tilt-shift effect of the lens creates the illusion that the photo is of a real city, and the layout:

The most corrosive, but not willing to spend their honestly earned money on tilt-shift optics, to heighten the effect, I can play with the level and saturation sliders, and also harmlessly increase the sharpness - the tilt-shift effect will become more noticeable. Done, enjoy!

Want to play with tilt-shift, but too lazy to deal with Photoshop? No problem. You can easily find online services that allow you to create a tilt-shift effect without mastering the numerous intricacies of processing - just upload photos to the site and get your own processed pictures as output; the viewer will have a quite convincing feeling that they were shot with a tilt-shift lens.

Funny effect this very tilt-shift? Undoubtedly. Should it be used frequently? Hardly. As in the case with any other photographic tool and technique, tilt-shift and all sorts of "skews" for it are far from always appropriate - it all depends on the artistic task facing the photographer. Thus, it is easy to add grotesqueness to familiar pictures, to achieve the illusion of a toy world. Whether your pictures need it at this particular moment is up to you.

Good luck and lots of great photos.

The tilt-shift effect is already well known to photography lovers. For anyone who knows what it is and how to achieve this effect, just a few photos to view. For everyone else, a short description and explanation of the effect.

Tilt-Shift is an interesting effect that turns an ordinary photo into an illusion of a toy world. Only small area image is in focus, most of the image is blurred. Colors and contrast are increased and it gives the impression of unreality. The tilt-shift effect can be obtained in several ways:

Shooting with a tilt-shift lens: real tilt-stay shooting requires special lenses, such as the Nikon lens in the picture.

With this lens, you can capture a large area of ​​the image. In addition, the lenses inside the lens can be tilted and rotated to change perspective.

Shift allows the photographer to change the position of the image transmitted by the lens relative to the digital camera sensor. This means that the perspective center of the lens no longer matches the perspective center of the image, and the effect is similar to using a side-crop in an image taken with a lens with a wider angle of view.

Rotation allows the photographer to rotate the plane of sharpest focus so that it is no longer perpendicular to the optical axis of the lens. This produces a wedge-shaped depth of field that increases in width with distance from the camera.The tilt-shift technique works mechanically.

Software : the effect of tilt shift, that is, a shift in perspective, can be obtained using various programs for creating photographs in this style. The programs use a special algorithm that blurs with the desired force at a given point, while the programs completely repeat the optical blur effect. Due to this effect, the objects in the picture look like toy miniatures. This is a budget opportunity to get a tilt-shift photo, because. special lenses are very expensive (about 50 to 80 thousand rubles). In addition, using programs, the photographer can experiment with settings for an infinitely long time and create any number of thumbnail options. If the picture was taken using a tilt-shift lens, then there will no longer be an opportunity to edit and correct this effect.

Lensbaby is a lens developed by Lensbabies that incorporates the charms of Monocle and Tilt-Shift. Lensbaby is quite flexible and can be used for tilt and shift. The downside is that it's almost impossible to move or tilt with the same amount of force and is therefore inconvenient to use in burst shooting. Here's a shot taken with Lensbaby:

freelancing- Literally means "no lens". We are talking about the deliberately incorrect use of the lens of a SLR camera (or a system mirrorless camera), when it (the lens) is simply unfastened from the carcass and rotated in an arbitrary direction.
Freelensing for bold creative people. In this technique, the lens is separated from the camera and rotated by hand into different sides(incline). Success, as a rule, is variable, good pictures are not always obtained in this way, and this, of course, is not an alternative to good optics or software. Stray light behind the lens can cause additional problems. Try it, you might like it.

Photoshop- tilt-shift effect can also be obtained in a graphics editor. This is our next post ;-)

Photo examples tilt-shift

Kyle D. Adams Freelensing

Rachel Landers | Stairway in Rome

cityshrinker | London

Cityshrinker|New York City

Cityshrinker X Geelong

cityshrinker | Coney Island

cityshrinker | Old/New/Old/New

Pixcube Animation Studio | Little Beijing

Not very new but interesting video Video: Little Beijing von Pixcube Animation Studio

Also not new, but interesting video Video: Sammy Metwalli | Tinytown Berlin

Tilt-shift lens - whatever one may say, a useful thing. Take, for example, the effect adored by many: large-sized objects being filmed are depicted as tiny figures. Many compact cameras have built-in software filters that simulate this effect. However, it is created with a tilt-shift lens. Below we provide answers to five popular questions related to tilt-shift lenses so that you can learn a little more about its capabilities before using it.

What are tilt-shift lenses?

This type of lens is often referred to as perspective corrective. Tilt-shift lenses have the ability to tilt, rotate (from English tilt), the image plane at an angle to the plane of the photosensitive layer. And also to shift (from the English shift) the image plane along the plane of the photosensitive layer.

How does a tilt-shift lens work?

The design of the lens is such (which outwardly distinguishes it from the many "relatives") that the front part is movable. It can be tilted at a predetermined angle relative to the sensor plane. As a result, you can get the depth of field in one part of the scene being shot is extremely small, in another - close to infinity.

• Note. translator - you can learn more about IPIG from the article

The ability to shift the front of the lens along the plane of the photosensitive sensor can be useful in architectural photography. When photographing a building with a normal lens, you will most likely encounter a distorted image of straight lines. The verticals will curve and converge towards the center of the frame.

The image of tall structures with a conventional lens can be distorted.

The use of a tilt-shift lens in architecture photography is an opportunity to correct the perspective image at the shooting stage. Instead of doing the correction at the processing stage.

Who makes tilt-shift lenses?

Canon offers 4 TS-E (tilt-shift) lenses that "cover" the focal length range from 17mm to 90mm. Nikon releases 3 lenses (PS-E, perspective control - “perspective control”) with focal lengths in the range from 24 to 85 mm.

Native tilt-shift lenses are compatible with both full-frame cameras and cameras with an APS-C sensor.

• PRome. translator - more about the size of modern photosensitive sensors and related features You can find out from the article.

When is it appropriate to use a tilt-shift lens?

It comes in handy when shooting architecture. It will allow you to “keep” high walls of buildings vertical, which, when shooting with a conventional lens, “strive” to bend into an arc and lean towards the center of the frame. This distortion is the stronger, the higher the building being photographed and the closer you are to it - the photographer.

In the mode of tilting the plane of the front lens at an angle to the plane of the photosensitive sensor, the tilt-shift lens is very useful in landscape photography. In scenes where it is necessary to depict objects, both distant and nearby in relation to the shooting point, in sharpness at the same time.

How to attach a tilt-shift lens to a camera? Are there any features?

Such lenses have a typical mount. They are attached to the camera in the same way as conventional lenses. The lens itself has elements that allow you to control the tilt angle relative to the sensor plane and the amount of displacement relative to the optical axis of the lens.

Among modern lenses, in addition to the widely used "fixes" and "zooms", there are also lenses for special purposes - the so-called "tilt-shift lenses". Most often, these lenses are used on 35mm SLRs or medium format professional cameras.

Perspective control with Tilt/Shift lenses

Shift is a function that allows you to shift the optical axis of the lens, thereby controlling perspective images. Typically, this function of the TS lens is used for architectural or other technical shooting.
The use of tilt-shift lenses helps to move the scene to different parts of the image plane, correct "falling buildings", change the shape of an object, control perspective, etc.

Tilt / Shift (TS) lenses are high-quality, expensive optics that make it easier for the photographer to photograph complex subjects (architecture, still life, indoor photography, etc.). Also Tilt / Shift lenses are widely used in such a genre as advertising photography. Such lenses are not autofocus lenses, they are manually adjusted and are usually classified as wide angle lenses.

Principle of operation

The optical design of the Tilt/Shift lenses is such that the field quality image much larger than the frame area, due to which the photographer can shift the frame within this field by moving or tilting the lens relative to the film plane. The cost of Tilt / Shift lenses is comparable to the cost of a modern SLR camera and ranges from a thousand dollars or more.
To say that Tilt / Shift lenses fix something in the frame is not entirely true. Rather, they allow us to restructure the plot according to our usual perception. As you know, our visual perception does not accurately reflect the geometric construction of the world, as a mirror does, but produces a psychological processing of the seen picture in the brain.
To illustrate the above, consider a simple example. Looking at a tall building close up, we lift our heads up, examining it piece by piece. In our minds, the vertical walls of a building remain vertical. If we photograph the building from this position, tilting the camera upwards, then in the photograph it will look like “falling”. By using a TS lens, we can keep the camera horizontal without tilting it. To get the whole building into the frame, we simply move the TS lens up.

The Tilt/Shift lens is also useful when shooting mirrored surfaces, since such lenses allow you to avoid the presence of the reflection of the camera and the photographer himself in the frame.

Controlling Depth of Field with a TS Lens

tilt- This is a function of a photographic lens that allows you to control the sharpness in the frame by changing the tilt of the optical axis of the lens. The main application of this function is subject photography. Also, the Tilt function is used to obtain artistic portraits, somewhat less often this function is used in landscape photography.
Using Tilt/Shift lenses, which help to go beyond the usual depth of field and perspective, and belong to the category of artistic lenses, photographers can achieve an interesting effect: real objects depicted in the picture take the form of miniature toy models.

Such pictures are usually taken from high-altitude points - mountains, pillars, roofs of buildings, etc. The Tilt / Shift lens focuses on a certain part of the visible field, blurring, and quite strongly, everything else. People who do not want to spend money on expensive Tilt / Shift lenses can achieve a similar effect when processing a photo in Photoshop, blurring the edges of the photo a lot. But a picture taken with a Tilt/Shift lens will be much more beautiful and interesting than a fake one.
Tilt/Shift technology is used by truly creative photographers. It allows them to take unusual photographs that are inaccessible to traditional lenses, turning the world around us into an illusory miniature.