Wow ChickenHawk! That’s great, very convincing. There’s a group on flickr that is devoted to this and yet all anyone does is blur the top and bottom. It kind of works depending on the picture but what you have done is way better than 99% of what I’ve seen. Way to go!
A few things that I have learned;
In hindsight I think I usually don’t blur the foreground and background enough. It’s good to look at pictures of real models and dioramas to see how out of focus the foreground and background typically are (depending on the scale). I don’t think I blurred my pictures enough (except maybe the Hoover Dam one).
Downward looking pictures are best to start with. Usually we look at models and dioramas from a high angle, so pictures of real things that we want to make look like a diorama are best if they are also taken from a high angle. I’ve taken a gazillion digital pictures over the years but have only a small handful that have a good angle for this. I’ve been meaning to specifically head out to take high angle pictures from good, high vantage points just to do this fake-tilt-shift thing with. I scanned the Hover Dam picture from film because I have no other good digital pictures to work with.
Sandman,
That’s great as well, but like mine I think it could use more out of focus blur in the foreground and background. Also, the smaller the picture the greater the need for more out-of-focus blur. That same picture larger may look more convincing at the same blur setting.
