Tilt-Shift Photography With the GIMP

Tilt-Shift photography is an interesting technique which can be used to make the real world look like a miniature model. The ‘right’ way to do it is with a special Tilt-Shift lens but they are not cheap. Hence, people have found ways of cheating by taking the shot with a regular lens and then adding in the Tilt-Shift effect later during post-processing. I found a nice tutorial for doing this with the GIMP today so I figured I’d give it a go.

Unfortunately it takes a certain kind of shot for this to work well and it turns out I don’t have any well-suited images in my library. I did find one shot that was close to what was needed so I had a go with that. The results aren’t great but I guess it gives some sort of idea of what I’m on about. I’m going to keep an eye out for opportunities for taking suitable shots and should I succeed I’ll post back with my results. In the mean time, here’s some examples of how it should be done.

Update (16 April 2008): I’ve created my own more current and more detailed tutorial here.

[tags]Tilt-Shift, Photography, GIMP[/tags]