Fake a tilt-shift lens
A real tilt-shift lens tilts its focal plane against the sensor, which is why only a thin slice of a photographed street or skyline stays sharp. Tilting a lens on a phone or a stock photo isn’t an option, so this tool reproduces the same shallow depth of field digitally: a band or spot of the frame stays sharp, and everything outside it blurs by an amount that grows with distance from that zone.
Linear vs radial focus
Linear focus draws a straight band across the frame at any angle and blurs above and below it, matching how a real tilt-shift lens defocuses a skyline or a street shot from a rooftop or a drone. Radial focus keeps an elliptical spot sharp instead, which fits photos taken looking straight down, such as a market stall, a workbench, or a plate of food. Focus line places the band; Focus X and Focus Y place the spot.
Blur that grows with distance
Cross-fading a sharp photo with one heavily blurred copy is the usual shortcut, and it is why most fake tilt-shift looks wrong: a pixel halfway through the transition becomes a sharp image with a ghost over it, not a half-blurred one, so the frame reads as sharp until it abruptly reads as blurred. Here every pixel gets its own blur radius, computed from its distance to the focus zone, including the fractional part. Buildings at the edge of the band come out genuinely softened rather than doubled.
The blur also runs in linear light rather than on the stored sRGB values. Bright windows and street lamps then bloom outward the way a defocused lens renders them, instead of averaging into grey.
Good source photos
The miniature illusion needs a photo that already looks like it could be a scale model once the depth cues are faked. An elevated or aerial angle helps because it flattens the scene the way a tabletop model would appear from above. Recognizable objects at a consistent scale, people, cars, buses, roofs, sell the size trick; an empty field or a close-up has nothing for the eye to measure against. The source image should also be sharp before processing: the effect fakes missing depth of field, it doesn’t restore detail an already-soft photo doesn’t have.
Miniature pop
A correctly shaped blur is not enough on its own. Painted and printed scale models look more saturated and higher in contrast than full-size subjects under natural light, and a small lens darkens the corners. Miniature pop applies all three at once, so one slider covers the grade that turns a shallow depth of field into a toy scene. Set it to 0 to keep the original colors and use the blur alone.