Photo every day of the year - Jan 18th - Toy Town

Continuing with trying out new things and techniques, I have today taken a rather mundane shot of a round about with the thought to make into a fake "tilt/shift" lens image to make it all look like a toy model set.

Toy Town © Mark Pelleymounter

This was done as follows:



Firstly, duplicate the photo to a new layer in photoshop and add lens blur (filter/blur/lens blur).  I used settings of Hexagon, 60 blur, 0 Curvature and 0 Rotation, then in same menu dropped Specular Highlights Threshold to 252 and Brightness to 2.

Having applied the blur, I flattened the image, changed to LAB mode (image/mode/Lab colour) and dragged the A channel in at both ends and did the same for the B channel, but brought this in twice as much as the A channel.  Then a slight curves tweak in the Lightness channel, flattened the image again and changed it back to RGB mode (image/mode/RGB colour.

Then a final unsharp mask and it was ready to go.