Tutorial of photo retoching - Using the Tilt shift blur & Curves Adjaustment in Photoshop CS6

Tutorial of photo retoching - Using the Tilt shift blur & Curves Adjaustment in Photoshop CS6

By Andres Garcia Hi there and welcome to my first tutorial.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use the new Tilt shift blur and the Adjustment Curves, new feature in Adobe Photoshop CS6. Bear in mind that you want to give the impression of a miniature model. Miniature models are usually viewed from above so try and choose a photo with an elevated viewpoint. Buildings, roads, traffic and railways are excellent choices but make sure there is a reasonable wide angle of view.

So lets get started!

First step place the pictures in Photoshop, and duplicated the layer so we can see the difference after. To do it, we can grab the picture and drag it where it says new layer or we can use the short cut Command + J, (cmd + J), in PC (Ctrl+J)

This is the icon to create a new layer.

Blank layer or duplication layer.

Then we go to Filter - Blur - Tilt Shift.

Here we also have values set.

Now here we can see that 4 lines dividing my picture appear. These lines can be adjusted just according to what you want in your pirtures.The first and the last one are the ones that give more blurness. Set your own value according to your image. Drag the center rounded slider for more or less blur option.

I’’ll set my values to the point that i consider is OK. So I’ll start with Blur. In my pictures I will set it in 18 px, distortion I’ll set it on 7% not to lose too much of my details..

Here in the Blur effects we also have some extra values. For Light Bokeh which I’ll set on 16% to gain more light, then Bokeh Color which I’ll give 17% And to finish the Light Range which I’ll put the black values all the way to 4 so we can see more of the darker colors in our image. And I kept the 255 for the light colors so we kept the contrast.

If we unselected the preview option we can see how was our image and see the difference. If we like the result we go head and press OK or enter, (in the keyboard).

Now that we finished with the Title Shift, we can pass on to our second tool in this tutorial which is the adjustments curves. So lets go to windows and click on adjustments.

We’ll see it on the right side in the screen.

Adjustments Curves Icone

Now one of the fantastic things is that CS6 it has the Auto. Is an Auto-correction in the adjustments tools and by pressing in Auto it will change automatically the images colors.

And this will be our result. Pretty cool!

But if you prefer to do it yourself, it is, specially if you are in the photography field.

Here we can see 3 droppers that work to set the color spots.

The first one for example, is to set the black on the image, the second one for the gray and the last one for the white.

Obviously you can select other spots to see the difference. You can make something really extreme or more artistic lets say.

But if you click on this icon, you can adjust by adding points.

This icon to make the image more accurate, in my case I will click on it.

In this menu we have some options that you can also use depending on what you want to achieve. By keeping default the pictures will stay as it is; but if you click in one of these options this is what will happen to the image.

Color Negative

Cross Process

Darcker

Increase Contrast

Lighter

Linear Contrast

Medium Contrast

Negative

Strong Contrast

In my case I really liked the Cross Process. And I moved a little the curves manually.

If you have set of pictures where the light and shadows is the same you can adjusts the input and output by adding the number.

The last thing to know is what the little icons on the bottom part of the menu are for.

Adjust it to the layer below

Click to preweiw it

Return to default

To view it

Delete changes

With these I think you can play and see which one is the best or if you need to redo something.

To finish we will save it as a psd or Tiff file.

So I hope you like this tutorial.

Bye

Comparison of the original and the final result.

Capraia 2011

2012

Student: Andres Garcia