Fantastic Tilt-Shift Photography

Time required: 10 min.

Here you can find out how you can achieve the fake tilt-shift effect with your own photos. You can also use this image as your starting point or you can use one of yours (tip: pick one of cityscape, landscape or seascape, featuring foreground subjects, like people cars, ships or buildings in the centre of the photograph).

You will also need to download Gimp (free image editing software) if you don't have one already installed.

1. Open Gimp and drag-and-drop your image to the main "window" or go File>Open then find your downloaded photo, then press "Open".

2. Go Layer>Duplicate Layer.

3. Go Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Set the Blur Radius to 15px (If you are using one of your photos, you'll need to adjust this blur to the relevant image size eg. I'm using photo size 2000x1381, so if your image is bigger you need to increase the amount of blur applied to the image, and so on.)

4. Now, go Layer>Mask>Add Layer Mask>White (full opacity)>Add.

5. On your "toolbox" window pick "Gradient" tool. Set the foreground colour to black. In your "Layer, Tool Options, Brushes..." window, click on the "Tool Options" tab, and change Shape to "Bi-linear".

6. Place the cursor in the centre of your image, now click and drag it all way upwards (or downwards, if your subjects are situated at the bottom of the photograph) while holding "Ctrl" key. Do this a few times if you need to, make sure to include as many foreground subjects as you can in the sharpest area of the photo.

7. Next, go Image>Merge Visible Layers>Expanded as necessary>Merge

8. Go, Colours>Hue-Saturation, drag the "Saturation" slide bar to reach 50. Press "OK".

9. Now, go Colours>Levels, change the "black pipette" value to 20 and "white pipette" value to 240.Press "OK".

10. Finally,go Image>Merge Visible Layers. Now you can see the final result.

To finish, go Image> Flatten Image, then you can save it as .jpeg or .png(File>Save As).

If you have any questions or suggestions with regards to this tutorial, please leave a note in our comment section here.