Tilt Shift Effect
Tilt shift effect for photos and video: keep one band sharp and blur the rest, so a street seen from above looks like a model village. Free, in your browser.
What is a tilt shift effect?
A tilt-shift lens can slide and tilt in front of the camera's sensor. Architectural photographers use the shift to keep walls upright and the tilt to swing the plane of focus. Tilt it the other way and the plane of focus cuts steeply through the scene, leaving only a narrow band sharp.
That narrow band is what makes the miniature effect. Shoot a street or a harbor from above with a thin strip in focus and it looks like a model photographed up close, since only small, nearby subjects show such a shallow depth of field.
How to make a miniature effect
Load a photo or a clip taken from high up, looking down on a street or a harbor. It opens on the Miniature preset, with a sharp band across the middle and a blur that grows above and below it.
Focus moves the sharp line top to bottom. Width sets how much stays sharp around it as a share of the frame's height, so the default 0.25 keeps a quarter. Taper sets how gradually the blur comes in past the band, and Blur how soft the far parts get, on the same 0 to 20 scale as Blur Image. Angle turns the line; 90 stands it upright.
Tight line, Diagonal, Upright, Soft edges and Low horizon are starting points for other kinds of shots. The effect only blurs, so your colors stay as they are.
Settings for a model village, a flat lay and one person in a crowd
Model village from a rooftop: Focus on the street where the people are, about 0.6, with Width 0.12, Taper 0.3 and Blur 12. A thin band and a strong blur sell the small scale. Toy-bright colors help too, so bump up the saturation afterwards with a tool from the Color Effects hub.
Food or product flat lay: Diagonal, at Angle 30 and Width 0.2, laid along the row of dishes so the band follows the layout.
One person in a wide scene: Upright, at Angle 90 and Width 0.3, then slide Focus across until the band covers them.
What is the Scheimpflug principle?
In an ordinary camera the sensor and the lens are parallel, and so is the plane that comes out sharp. Tilt the lens and that plane tilts with it: the sensor plane, the lens plane and the plane of sharp focus always meet in one line. Theodor Scheimpflug laid out the rule in a 1904 British patent on correcting aerial photographs, though he pointed to a 1901 patent by Jules Carpentier for the idea itself.
A fake tilt shift skips the optics and blurs the picture by its distance from a line. Researchers at Berkeley (Held, Cooper, O'Brien and Banks, 2010) found that a straight blur gradient running the same way as the scene's distance, top to bottom for ground seen from above, shrinks a scene about as well as a real tilt-shift lens.
Why doesn't my tilt shift look like a miniature?
The trick needs a high view looking down, where the ground recedes from the bottom of the frame to the top. At eye level the blur runs against the scene's actual depth, and you just get an ordinary shallow-focus photo.
Keep the sharp band on things at one distance from the camera, like a single street, and lower Taper so the blur builds up quickly past it.
Saving a tilt shift video
Time-lapse footage suits it best, because cars and people move in quick jumps like toys. Set FPS to 15 in the video export settings and the movement gets choppier still, with the stop-motion feel of a model railway.
The blurred top and bottom carry little detail, so a JPG of a miniature photo stays small even at the full 2048 px.