Miniature Faking

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Miniature Faking

Blurring parts of a photo simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered in close up photography. You can take a normal photo and convert it into a faked miniature photo by subjecting it to this kind of processing. Today’s post will show how to build a MSG preset effect that generates a faked miniature photo look.

The miniature faking effect shown above was generated by processing a normal overhead photo of a street scene with the MSG preset shown below. The MSG preset is configured to build a spatially modulated resolution independent blur effect.

You can control the width and other aspects of the blur here

A SetToAngularTube processor is used to build a grayscale tube image in the Tmp Img image stream. An Invert processor is then used to invert the grayscale values of the tube, so that the center of the tube is black and the top and bottom of the image is white.

The tube image is going to be used to spatially modulate a 3ModBlurFloatSumArea processor. As the modulation image gets lighter, it modulates the blur processor to blur more in those local areas. Due to the way the inverted tube image is rotated, the center of the image will not be filtered and then as you move vertically away from the center the image will get progressively more blurred.

The 3ModBlurFloatSumArea processor uses float sum image streams, and is designed to generate resolution independent modulatable blur filtering effects. It processes color images, so you need 3 different Float Img image streams, one for each input color channel image stream. The 1ToFloatSumArea processor converts a normal image stream into a float sum image stream.

Spatially modulated blur effects are useful for creating all kinds of different interesting visual effects beside simulating fake miniature views. You could use a noise or textural image stream to do the spatial blur modulation. Or you could build a modulation image based on some visual characteristic of the source image (like edge texture for example).’

Here is the preset 6-22Mini.msg

Category: MSG

Miniature Faking

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