Tiny downtown

I've been meaning to try a tilt/shift picture for a while. The first one I ever saw on Blip was from Poppins and looked so much like a scale model, it blew my mind.

The more recent Blip from Anonymoose is fantastic because of the presence of tiny people plus it includes a link to an online tilt/shift maker!

The technique works really well with a picture that offers a long, slightly aerial view. The effect appears to be little more than a thin band with heavily feathered edges and sharper focus and a very blurred top and bottom. If you've worked with layers in PS, it is relatively easy to recreate it.

In my case, and I'm sure there are more and better ways to do this, I did all the stuff to the photograph first (desat/contrast/tint/crop) duplicated the background layer so I'd have a way out if it didn't work, used the rectangular marquee tool with a 60 pixel feather, dragged a band across the picture (about 1/4 of the height, not quite centered), Ctrl/J to put that on its own layer, went back to the full duplicate layer and did a fairly severe Gaussian blur.

My next one will definitely have little people in it, it makes it look even more like a tiny diorama! So you blippers who live up on hills or have access to train yards or ship yards or docks, bring it on! Can't wait to see!