Technique PHOTO-EDITING MASTERCLASS
Rod Lawton shows how you can create a tilt-shift ‘miniature’ effect in Affinity Photo using its Depth of Field Live Filter
Using digital depth of field tools, you can create pretty convincing simulations of the real thing. Affinity Photo’s Depth of Field Live Filter does just that.
What’s more, it can be used to create elliptical blur around a single subject or a tilt-shift blur to simulate a ‘miniature’ effect as if you’re looking down on a model rather than a real subject.
For all sorts of reasons, digital depth of field effects are not exact replicas of the optical depth of field effects from using wide-aperture lenses or photographing actual models. Nevertheless, they are close enough that you still get the broad effect and feel of shallow depth of field.
The tilt-shift effect shown here is especially interesting because it uses a kind of optical illusion where we associate shallow depth of field and this kind of foreground/background blur with close-up photography – which reinforces the idea that we’re looking at a miniature model and not a real-world scene.
This works even better with subjects we’re used to seeing in model form, such as this street scene viewed from above. A high viewpoint is actually an important part of the illusion because our brains are then more willing to accept a plane of sharp focus around the main subject and progressively increasing blur in the ‘foreground’ at the bottom of the picture and the ‘background’ at the top.
Affinity Photo’s implementation is especially interesting because it allows for a sharp ‘strip’ in the centre of the image that allows for a bit more control over what appears sharp and what is starting to blur.
What’s also clever is that Affinity Photo can apply this as a Live Filter. This means that the blur effect is not baked into the image pixels, but exists on its own separate and re-editable Live Filter layer, so that you can go back at any point in the future to re-edit the effect.
So, let’s see how it’s done.
Top tip
Even with the Vibrance slider in the Live Depth of Field panel at its maximum, the saturation increase is quite modest and our image doesn’t quite have that super-saturated ‘toy town’ look we’re after. That’s easy enough to rectify with a Vibrance adjustment layer. Despite the name, these actually include a Saturation slider too, and that’s what we need to use here because Affinity Photo’s vibrance adjustments are a little too subtle for strong effects like this one. In Affinity Photo, Live Filters are attached to specific layers, whereas adjust
