I have been a big fan of tilt shift photography for awhile. We covered how to create a tilt-shift look in Lightroom awhile back and a few awesome posts with some inspirations tilt shift photos here: Great photos using Tilt-Shift lenses for portraits and 10 amazing examples of tilt shift photography. It’s always been a look that I have loved for awhile but can be pretty expensive to get into with lenses like the Canon 24mm Tilt-shift starting at around $2,200 it is a pricey lens to shoot this type of an effect. There are different ways to achieve similar effects digitally but with Adobe Photoshop CS6 it becomes very easy and the results are great!
Here is a review on how easy it is to create a tilt shift blur with Adobe Photoshop CS6. First the Tilt-Shift blur can be found under Filters –> Blur –> Tilt Shift. This opens up a new blur tools with 3 new types of blur tools on the right panel. I’ll just focus on the tilt shift blur today but will cover all the new blurs as well as all new additions in CS6 coming up soon so make sure to subscribe to our site updates on the top right to keep up to date on all new articles.
Photoshop will show 4 lines across the screen so you can control the size of the blur. Simply click and drag any of the lines to make them smaller/larger or roll over the white dot on the inside line and then drag to move the angle of the blur.
Adobe has also added a really handy way to adjust the amount of blur with the large circle in the center. Here you can just click and drag within this circle to change the amount of blur. You can also use the slider in the control panel on the right but I find it much more intuitive to use the center point and drag and drop to change the amount of blur.
Quick Tip: If you want to see what the actual mask looks like hold down the M key to see a preview of the mask.
Once you get the blur just right click on the OK button at the top to render the blur. Photoshop CS6 has some really solid performance improvements from what I have seen so far and everything renders pretty much right away.
You can also add more than 1 blur actions if you need to. When you move your cursor outside of the center dot or any of the lines you will see it changes to a thumbtack with a + sign. Click your mouse to add a second tilt-shift blur to the image. You can add as many of these as you need.
That’s it, in just a few quick seconds you have a really slick looking tilt-shift image! What do you think about this new filter in Photoshop? Will you use it, let me know in the comments below.
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