Tilt-Shift Photography: Create a Micro World with Your Drone

Ever wanted to turn the world into a miniature model? Well, the good news is that you don’t need to ascend to godhood nor do you need an expensive tilt-shift lens, DSLR/SLR, or to climb up to the rooftop to get a shot of the great scene. All you need is a drone and a few minutes to edit the photo.

So how to make a micro world out of your aerial photos? Essentially, all you need to do is to find a suitable scene (e.g., downtown), take some shots, and create the micro-world visual effect by increasing the saturation as well as adding tilt-shift effects during the post-production.

Get an Ideal Shot

Getting an ideal shot for a tilt-shift photograph does not sound as hard as its name. Here we offer a few tips to help:

To start, the overall environment of your shot should be tidy and clean. This way, the clarity will help us to focus on the main subject and thus making the blurry effect more natural. Yet the scenery should also be full of details, so that the blurriness will in turn open up people’s imagination for the photo. Let’s take a look at some good examples here:

When you find the perfect scene, fly your drone to a suitable altitude (it does not need to be too high above it), tilt the camera down (around 30° to 45 °) to take a high-angle shot. Make sure you get enough depth-of-field in your photo without making the view too flat.

When using a Mavic 2 Zoom, you could take advantage of its zoom lens. After deciding your main subject, you are free to zoom in using remote controller or scroll down the slider on the screen and shoot a relatively further subject. Without Mavic 2 Zoom, you could still emphasize your subject by cropping the original image.

Gif/zoom in

Post-Production

Now that your shot is done. Let’s move to the next step, editing it in the Photoshop. You can also use the Snapseed or Lightroom apps on your smartphone to finish the post-production.

Step 1: Open Photoshop and import your photo. (Here we use Adobe Photoshop CC 2017.) Crop the image and adjust the composition if the theme/main subject of your shot needs to be further highlighted.

Step 2: Go to Filter –Blur Gallery- Tilt Shift to edit your photo. Play around with saturation, contrast, and blur until you’re satisfied with your micro world.

Play around with saturation, contrast, and blur until you’re satisfied with your micro world.

Final result:

Another way to better achieve the tilt-shift effect is to do this in step 2: select the background, press ctrl+J to copy the layer. Then select layer 1, click on Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur and get your ideal blurring effect. After that, add a vector mask to layer 1, and use brush to sharpen the subject and its environment.

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Final result like this: