Over the last month or so, I have kept seeing all over the web examples of tilt-shift photography. Actually, that's not strictly true; tilt-shift lenses are intended to help correct the perspective effect you get when, for example, looking up at a tall building which appears to narrow as it climbs.

No, in this context, I'm talking about taking photos using the tilt-shift lenses to make pictures of everyday scenes look like they're scale models, such as the one above. Ah, but, no. The picture above is one of my own – shot from the Pierre Cardin's mansion in Cannes, no less – taken with an ordinary camera, which I've doctored in Photoshop.

Examining the tilt-shift photos I've seen prompted me to think it would be easy to fake, and indeed so it proves. It's basically just mucking about with Quick Mask and gradients, then using the Lens Blur filter, plus giving the RGB curve a blow-out bias to make everything look that little bit artificial. I'm not yet completely satisfied with the results – some more tinkering is required – but I think the effect is pretty convincing.

(A big part of creating a convincing example, I've discovered, is in the choice of original image: not only is it simplest to work with images where the perspective slopes uninterruptedly from foreground to background, but as we're used to seeing models from above, the mind seems to accept photos taken pointing downwards much more readily than those looking straight across or up.)

If there's enough interest, I'll post a quick tutorial on here, but as it's 2:37am and my wife arrives back in London tomorrow, I'd better be off to my bed.

Click on the photo above to see it side-by-side with the original.