Faking Shift Tilt Photography with the GIMP

If you use Flickr at all or read Digg, you have probably come across the Shift Tilt Photography Craze, or more precisely the trend of faking it with Photoshop. I recently came across a great Photoshop tutorial for this effect but was not able to translate into steps that worked in the GIMP... until I found this awesome blog dedicated to translating PhotoShop tutorials for GIMP users.

The instructions were simple enough and I was able to apply this effect to one of my own photos with reasonable success. If you read the article, you will note that the author recommends using aerial photographs to achieve the best result. This is true because it reduces the chance of taller objects extending from in-focus to out-of-focus and vice versa. Since a taller object usually has the same depth (especially from a distance), its in-focus or out-of-focus state should really be maintained.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't have many (read zilch) aerial photos to choose from. The best photographs I have are scenery/landscape photographs taken from a distance. However, with a bit of work it is possible to salvage these photos and get a good shift tilt result. The trick is to create a duplicate layer of the original image and copy select objects from it into the layer you are applying the shift tilt effect to. In fact, this is what I did to bring some of the trees in the image above into focus while trees in the background remain out-of-focus.

Here's how I did this.

Follow along with the gimparoo tutorial up until step 10 dealing with the colours and follow these steps:

1. Closely look at your image and pick out the objects that have an incorrect focus for their depth (tip: don't be too picky and just pick the most obvious objects)
2. Bring your copied layer to the top of the stack and zoom in to an area showing an object you picked out
3. Use the 'Select Shapes from Image' tool to select the object (no need to be too picky)
4. Copy and paste the object into a new layer
5. In the case of bringing an out-of-focus object into focus, you don't need to do much as the object you just copied should be sharp. If you need to make the object appear blurry, apply the Gaussian Blur filter to your new layer.
6. Merge the new layer down into your shift tilt layer
7. Repeat for as many objects as you would like to fix (you can quickly drive yourself crazy if you pick too many)

Once you are done, head back to the original tutorial and complete the colour adjustment steps.

Cheers and I hope you found this useful.