So this year’s online trend in digital photography is photos of real places that look like pictures of models. I’ve thought it was neat since I first saw some of the photos, but I thought I couldn’t do it because I don’t have a tilt-shift lens.
But then yesterday Wil Wheaton linked to a photo of his that someone called vertigo25 had done up fake model style. From that page I found a link to a mirror of a tutorial on how to replicate the effect in Photoshop.
The result isn’t quite as cool as the real thing, but it’s still interesting. So I tried it out.
This is really the best I was able to come up with. You can see my other attempts here.
As you can tell, there are some issues with photos with large height variations. It’s kind of difficult to find the best focal area. Still, it was a fun experiment. Maybe I’ll eventually figure out how to do it better, or take a photo that is better suited for the process.
(vertigo25 used a different technique to create his mask, and linked to this example. It looks like he traced around the tree and bridge to keep them in the foreground. That would probably work better with the heights I’m dealing with.)