How to do miniature photography?

Hallo everyone…

I’m gonna share some interesting NOT SO ADVANCE PP “Faking Miniature Tilt-Shift Effects”. What you know about miniature effect!? Well I’m gonna paste what Mr. Wiki said here

“Miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is made to look like a photograph of a miniature scale model. Blurring parts of the photo simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered in close-up photography, making the scene seem much smaller than it actually is; the blurring can be done either optically when the photograph is taken, or by digital post-processing. Many faked-miniature photographs are taken from a high angle to simulate the effect of looking down on a miniature.” source: Wikipedia

Lets get started :D… I’m gonna show you how I did this conversion… In a simple way…

Ok… 1st you need to have a photo taken in elevated or bird-view…  for example picture shown below. Load into your Photoshop.

Once the photo loaded into your Photoshop. Copy the Background Layer in step-1. Then by pressing ‘Q’ on your keyboard, you will see the top explorer bar there change to QuickMask (step-2)

Do follow the steps highlighted in Red.

After you selected the Gradient Tools. By hold-on Shift-key then drag your mouse to the point where you want it to be your main subject that in focus. You will see a red gradient highlighted in Red. After satisfied with your selection, press ‘Q’ again.

After that, you go to Filter>>Blur>> LensBlur and new window pop-up. Do an adjustment for blurring effects as shown Below. Please don’t overdo it!

Ok so far so GOOD!?. For the Final touch-up. I normally enhanced it using HighPass with Hardlight Blending Mode and Saturation value around +30

Allrite, now you have it done already. But, let say you want to make it different from others. For example to put your hand or leg inside the picture. This how I do it.

Load your hand/leg photo taken with white background into your Photoshop. For this, I put my own hand inside. The reason I picked white background because easy to make selection using the selection tools in Photoshop. If you have a great lighting setup and skills, you can do better then mine haha…

Copy and paste the Hand photo into your miniature working area. Then select the subject(which is the hand) using the selection tools or magic wand also can!
Press the “add vector mask” icon at right-below next to Ying-Yang icon.

Tadaaaaaa….!!! The hand inserted onto your background picture.

Then, make a final adjustment for example move the hand, dodge and burn to create shadow or what so ever you like as long it will look nice! 😀

Ok… Have fun and try it… 😀