I really enjoy surfing through articles offering tips and tricks for photography post-processing. While I'm most interested in understanding apertures and shutter speeds and learning how to use my camera properly, to get the right exposure and contrast in-camera as opposed to relying on Photoshop to correct everything, I still think it's neat to do some obvious after-shoot editing.
Recently I was reading about using spot focus combined with lens blur to give a 'miniature' look to certain pictures. Miniature in the sense of - is it real? or is it a train set or something. It is supposed to work best on photos that have been taken looking downwards on the scene, so I scanned through my files and tried it on a few of them.
Basically (in Photoshop), you just select an area around the object, then 'inverse' the selection and apply a lens blur filter. You can play around with feathering the edges of the selection, as well as the shape of the lens blades, curvature, etc. in the filter set up.
Anyway, some pics end up looking more 'miniature' than others... and I can get a similar result using my Lensbaby... but it is still fun, none the less. Try it sometime!
Cheers.
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