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Creating fake 'Miniature' environments In Photoshop - Skill Level: Easy

good-tutorials.com — Very simple but effective photoshop tutorial to make real images look like miniatures, takes 2 minutes. You will need Photoshop CS2 or better.

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  • jdgraffam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+47This is actually a pretty neat trick.
  • E55P3A, on 10/12/2007, -21/+4Its a cool trick, but it is very much overplayed. Check flickr for 'tilt shift' if you don't believe me.
    • ref-d, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21This isn't tilt-shift, this is how to fake tilt-shift.
      Proper tilt-shift photography is a photography method, not something done in post.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_shift
    • E55P3A, on 10/12/2007, -36/+1[sarcasm] Oh really? Wow I never knew that you could do tilt-shift 'in camera'! [/sarcasm]
    • ref-d, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27You automatically assume I'm having a go, I was just pointing it out for people. Get over yourself.
    • RandomSkratch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ref-d

      E55P3A did not need to be dug down. He merely pointed out how to find more images like these on flickr. Yes it's done virtually but it's recreating tilt-lens photography. Both produce relatively the same results. Just one is right from the source, the other is out of the box.

  • anicejew, on 10/12/2007, -39/+9Summary:

    Just go to "image -> adjust size"
  • leoedin, on 10/12/2007, -15/+3"Photoshop CS2 or better"

    What's better than CS2?
    • FrankieB078, on 10/12/2007, -0/+35CS3?
    • SpikeX, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17The one which we do not speak of for its icon is hideous, ugly, and non-creative.
    • nunquam, on 10/12/2007, -7/+0CS3 (Damn, beaten to it. Come on with the 'delete' button Digg.)
    • chimaera2005, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The submitter is wrong anyway, it clearly states you need CS or better to use "Lens Blur."
    • Valacar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10You could easily replace the Lens Blur filter with a Gaussian Blur and it'll still look pretty much the same. Doing it that way would allow you to use something as far back as Photoshop 4.0.
    • wto605, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1it works with CS too... (per the original article)
    • theOster, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2i gotta say, i love the new icons. simple.
  • MuTeD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16I was looking at them and was like, "they just took miniture toys and took pictures then blurred the edges", then I re-read the article title and realized it was completely different. Guess the effect worked.
  • jdh24, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5It's cool how just adjusting the focus creates an illusion like that.
  • Pedlya, on 10/12/2007, -16/+1This is old and was first shown on Something Awful. Faggotry commence.
  • sbbath, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1CS3 Beta
  • thegreypilgrim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2See also the following tutorial from "Receding Hairline" previously submitted to digg,

    http://recedinghairline.co.uk/tutorials/fakemodel/

    • dacheetah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Man, that first one he uses as an example looks REALLY bad...
      The "half-assed attempt" that others here have done looks considerably better.
  • batmaster, on 10/12/2007, -11/+0I don't get it.

    Is that a model or is it a real photo? The photo in step 1 looks like a real city picture, so I'm kinda confused by all of this.

    Edit: Nevermind, after downloading Photoshop CS2 and trying it, it's the filter that makes a real picture look fake.
    • wto605, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11you downloaded photoshop in the 120 second time limit to edit copies, tried this and then commented... DUDE! what kind of internet connection do you have!

      And adobe's serves must feel good today too, giving one of you that much bandwidth
    • batmaster, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Yeah, I live on mars.

      Our time is different than yours. I'm writing this from the bathroom.

      No, haha, I had it extracted on my desktop from a while ago after downloading it, but never installed it. I just loaded up a bs overhead pic of a city and applied the last filter on it.
  • Mysteriouskk, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3http://www.duggmirror.com
  • pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7haha, at first I thought it was a tutorial to show you how to make miniatures look like real life, and I thought, eh, that still totally looks like a miniature.

    Then I actually READ it and was impressed. :D
  • vtsquire, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I just acheived the same effect in 7 by triplicating the original pic, blurring two and then adding layer masks to them. Flatten the image, then add a little saturation and tweak the colors so you get a cheezy lego/crayola color to everything.

    I'm sure I could do better than this with a little keep pratce.

    http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/116/firsttrysy9.jpg
  • leroj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7That's a pretty neat trick

    Here's my half-assed attempt: http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/4278/modelpicchufb8.jpg
    • JuyLe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Nice try, I like it !
    • wto605, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0if thats half-assed then i'd drool over a complete job, you must be a perfectionist
    • BOOFMAN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1nice attempt, looks pretty good, needs more contrast
  • Jake2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6That's a pretty cool effect.

    I dugg up (pun not intended) a suitable picture and tried it, here's my attempt:
    http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/1866/2006087kq4.jpg

    @leroj: yours is pretty aces!
  • ferndave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Thom Yorke's video for Harrowdown Hill achieves this kind of effect but with camera lenses.

    You can see it here: http://www.xlrecordings.com/theeraser/videos/9.html
  • sruffelman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That is really neat. My "toy" ship looked awesome.
  • HonoredMule, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Some of the examples attempts posted below the tutorial demonstrate a little cluelessness...like the apt buildings (most of the pic has the same view distance) or other pictures where the position and spread of the "focused" area is wrong for the content.
  • chadlewis76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4My feeble attempt, using an old vacation photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chadlewis/331286526/

    Neat trick.
    • greyhacker45, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Not bad, I'm convinced.
    • krisper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Very cool! I've been using Photoshop professionally since the spray can days, and I've never thought of doing this trick. Just goes to show: never stop looking at tutorials.
  • SuperNick, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8My attempts:
    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v146/SuperNick/My%20Photochops/ToyTownbytheSea.jpg

    And another attempt:
    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v146/SuperNick/My%20Photochops/ToyChurch.jpg
  • jackminardi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I
    like the one on the forums where he still did a top to bottom gradient when it was the side of a building. It should have been a side to side gradient. He didnt even realize it. Made me laugh
  • mrdoogee, on 10/12/2007, -6/+0and here's a quick GIMP tutorial for those of us who can't get Photoshop.
  • Dustyb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I was wondering how they did that on Adult Swim, I had thought it was real models, great work.
  • aRandomDude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0It is a neat trick. But how useful is it? You are going to do the tutorial like I did and then never use it again. Still a good tutorial and I dugg it anyways.
    • nreynolds, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ captainweasel

      Think about how a picture of a miniature environment would look. Would you be looking up at it? No. Only use this on shots where you're looking down (high angle) or across.

      EDIT: OK, that was weird, Digg just put my comment in the complete wrong place. I hadn't even scrolled down this far when I clicked reply. Well, it's supposed to be in the 1st thread.
  • MrBilly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Woo!! Im gonna make one with me dressed as Godzilla rampaging through Spanaway WA!
  • F1234K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1When ever i do the gradient it reds the top and bottom half rather then the middle..
    therefor being reversed...anyone know what could cause this.
    • Soave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Once you select the gradient tool, just check "reverse" up on the top toolbar.
  • huffnpuff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Excellent! Here's my pic of miniature Kandern, Germany:
    http://www.davekropf.com/images/miniature_kandern.jpg
  • Phyrefly, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I've seen this "tutorial" a year ago.

    This ass copied the whole thing without giving credit...
  • nitroskanker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2My attempt:
    http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/7105/minaturezp8.jpg
  • bubbazanetti, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2For those of you using GIMP...here is a DIRECT link to Gimp help...it was easy even for a PS noob like me.

    http://www.flickr.com/groups/tilt-shift-fakes/discuss/72057594073514981/
  • psygnisfive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9If you guys are curious about why this works:

    Think about what happens when you get really close to something with a camera. It's focal length needs to be short, right on that object, otherwise the object will be blurry. but with such a short focal length, small deviations from this distance will become blurry. Your brain, being well aware of the relationship between blurriness and distance, perceives the blurry parts of these being further or closer from the clear part. But how does that play into it looking miniature? Well, when you're normally looking at things, the distances are fairly large, and the objects fairly well distributed in terms of distance from you, so you'll have a whole lot of things that are blurry (the baxkground), and a whole lot of things that are clear (the foreground). In the raw images, however, the objects (the buildings, trains, etc.) are all very far away, and all very clearly focused, as the relative departure from focal length is not large enough to make them significantly blurry. This is the same way it would look if you had a miniature, with one exception: if the miniature is angled, then the scale of the minuature (ie how much "table space" is devoted to the miniature) comes into play, and things get blurry again. This is why you have to blur the real images outside of a single horizontal bar in the middle: in the miniature, when looking at an angle, only the closest little models would be clear, because the further you get, the farther from the focal length they get.

    This leads to a few suggestion I can give to everyone attempting to do it themselves: Make the blur strong, to give it the appearance of truly being further away. Second, make the images relatively small, so the band of focused stuff is also small, otherwise the effect won't seem as real because the apparent size of the clear part will seem larger and as a whole so then will the objects.
  • Ladon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The problem with this is that the tutorial didn't mention that objects inside the focal range need to stay within the focal range. Take a look at any vertical poles that extend outside their faked-focal range. Those need to be delicately and carefully masked too.
    • eltomate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I concur. The fellow who did the vert buildings that receed into the bg should have masked horizontally, not vertically. Some of the triers of the tutorial need to rethink their attempts. Good show though all around!
  • LeggNet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Some examples of ones I did a while back: http://www.leggnet.com/2006/03/model-homes.html
  • piranhaa, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Here's a few for you guys to agree-to-disagree on....

    http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/9360/disneyland2xa5.jpg
    http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/7816/disneylandoh0.jpg
    http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/8720/disneylandrollercoasterzh9.jpg
    • InsaneMachine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8nope, sorry, it has to have more of a distance and more angle from top for it to be effective. the one with the people in the rollercoaster just looks likes like a normal crappy blurry pic. Although the parking lot one looks pretty cool.
    • Pimptastic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1the problem is you see the sky in alot of them. that can ruin the perspective. Like Insane said, you need more of a down angle.
  • deardahl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Very nice trick, surprised that it works so well.
  • JoelCohen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i dont like how they are spineless when you click them, makes me feel like i am in some way hurting them, even though I know they aren't real!

    just a but freaky that is all
  • pickupjojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Some nice examples:
    http://flickr.com/photos/pickupjojo/135330966/
  • Panthereater, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i've tried those other tuts on the same damn thing and i could never get it to come out right. I'm glad that someone finally posted the right way to do it! awesome!
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