Today’s painting was inspired by my photograph of Wellington Harbour on a sunny, summer afternoon originally posted here. I also referred to the unedited image (prior to giving it the tilt-shift treatment and cropping it to remove the reflections from the hotel window) for some of the details.
One last photograph edited to make it look teeny tiny (it will be the last one for a while anyway). I think this one is my favourite.
I’m running out of suitable images to miniaturise in Photoshop. Here we are in 2007!
I’ve given the photo used in Monday’s Shoot it, Sketch it the ‘tilt shift’ lens blur treatment.
P.S. My Blog Awards page has been updated — I’ve just been nominated for the Sunshine Award : )
A photograph of the Hukafalls Jet on the Waikato River. No tourists, tour operators or boats were harmed in the miniaturisation of this image.
Last week, I had one of those ‘so that’s how they do it’ moments. I read about a clever piece of kit called a tilt-shift lens (used by photographers to control the way perspective appears in an image) and a way of mimicking the lens in Photoshop. With the right photo, you can digitally blur and manipulate it to make places and people look like miniatures. Even without the right photo, it’s still an interesting effect.
The latest version of Photoshop apparently has a ‘tilt shift’ blur feature but, really, it’s pretty straightforward: apply a reflected gradient and a lens blur so that parts of the image are out of focus, then adjust saturation and contrast to make the colours look more artificial.
The effect tends to work best with photos of people/vehicles/buildings taken from an elevated viewpoint. You don’t have to hire a helicopter to get a suitable photo… but climbing several flights of stairs to get just a little bit higher could make all the difference. With that in mind, I’m now on the hunt for really good photos to miniaturise : )
My thanks to Hovercraftdoggy for their inspirational We make models post (which includes a link to a tilt-shift photography Photoshop tutorial).
Anna Cull ~ Art & Music 