The trick to get a decent looking tilt-shift is the viewing angle for which you shoot from. To get a better looking tilt-shift or miniature look to what you’re shooting you need to shoot it from above. Here Keith and I stood up at the grassy area at the Stanley Park Tea House and looked down upon 3rd Beach. The steeper the angle of attack, the better of a miniature-feel it has. Another trick is to bump up the saturation of the image after you’ve applied your lens blur at the appropriate angle.

For a slightly better explanation of how to create a tilt-shift look to a photo using Photoshop, check out the post I wrote a little while ago.

The cool thing about Adobe products is that you can download the 30-day trial and it is the exact same thing as the regular retail version, but obviously expires after 30 days. You can purchase a retail key for the 30-day trial version if you so choose to do so. I find that I like being able to download these trials off the manufactures website as opposed to going to the store to purchase the box and CD/DVD. I prefer the less packaging approach to software and if I ever corrupt the install, I can just re-download the 30-day trial and enter my key to activate it.

The Process

If you want to download the 30-day trial of Adobe Lightroom 3.0, just check out Adobe’s product section and choose your flavour (PC/Mac).

Once downloaded you can go ahead and install via the executable. Since I have a Windows based box, these will be Windows based screenshots, I am sure the Mac version is similar in the way installation goes.

I’m not going to show each and every screenshot associated with the installing of a Windows based product because it is a typical install. Nothing seems to be different between this and another piece of software. One part is a tad different, but I will mention it when it comes to it.

It seems that the installer is fairly smart and installed the 64-bit version of Lightroom, I didn’t think about it at first actually, but I do prefer to use my 64-bit environment to it’s full extent. It doesn’t take very long to check existing files or to begin installing. It does ask you where to install the files and does install separately from previous versions.

Update Existing Catalog on Install

The only difference with this particular install is that during the install process it will ask you to update your current catalog. This is the catalog you previously had open when you used the previous version of Lightroom.

If you have been running  a previous version of Lightroom, it will ask you to update the current existing catalog. The process can be fairly lengthy depending on how large your catalog is. To give you an idea how long an upgrading of a catalog can be, it probably took 5-7 minutes to upgrade my main catalog which is 317MB in size with over 20,000 photos in it. I do take a lot of photos don’t I? Of course if you don’t have an existing catalog, you would just choose to create a new one.

A simple progress bar showing you an estimated time and length of the upgrading catalog process.

Finished!

Once the upgrade is complete it’s all ready to go! I haven’t actually gone through the latest features of this new version but I am sure I will pretty soon.

It was a pretty quick and painless upgrade. The only other thing to note is that any other catalogs you might have, will need to be upgraded when you switch to them.

Updating an Existing Catalog

When you want to switch to another catalog, it will ask you to update it to the latest version as well. It’s pretty simple and painless and you are prompted by the following screen.

In this case, I wanted to look through my photos of this year’s Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival up in Whistler. Don’t mind the catalog name, I must have been confused as to what year it was when I created the catalog name. I’m sure it is a fairly easy fix, but I just haven’t bothered to correct that little mistake.

Since this particular catalog wasn’t as big as my main catalog it took less time to update. I love easy processes.

So that’s it! I’ve upgraded from Adobe Lightroom 2.6 to Lightroom 3.0. Now I can go and remove Lightroom 2.6 and any other previous version I might still have sitting around on my machine.

What do you use for your organizing and post-processing of photos? If you’re not using Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, I do recommend checking either of them out. Unfortunately, Apple’s Aperture isn’t available for Windows, but does integrate nicely with iPhoto if you are used to using that on you Mac.

While out and about in Lost Lagoon (granted not today but on 6th of May) we came across a Mute Swan who was having to build up her nest due to the water levels of the Lagoon.  What we thought was funny was she kept trying to pull the same branch over and over again into her nest but it kept being uncooperative with her. I switch the camera over to video and recorded a quick 30 second clip.

She did it for a good 10 minutes. Not sure if she did not realize it was the same branch, or she could not quite figure out why it kept going back to the place she picked it up from.

I also uploaded the video to Vimeo instead of Flickr this time. No real reason for using a different service but thought I would put it there for fun.

Video Info

I took the 30 second clip from my Canon 7D (which uses the h.264 codec) and had to figure out how to convert it to a usable editable format that I could easily load into Adobe Premiere Elements 8.0. I decided to use MPEG Streamclip to convert the file using the DVCPRO codec which hopefully would retain the 1080p resolution.

I also figured out how to add text at various points during the video itself. I know it’s pretty cheesy, but I’m learning the video side of my camera. The video quality (to me) doesn’t seem spectacular, but that could have been also the lighting and SHS (Shaky Hand Syndrome) while trying to take the video.

Perhaps next time I’ll figure out how to add audio tracks to videos. I’m just hoping I can figure out an easier way to edit videos from my camera without spending all day trying to find the best settings. I also noticed that there are black bars on the left and right of the video as well. Not sure why, I’ve tried to export the video as an MPEG4 at 1280×720 at 29.97fps. The original 30 sec clip at 1080p is 177MB whereas the above video is about 1/3 the file size. Anyone edit videos on a Windows based computer using Adobe Premiere Elements? I need tips!

I am always looking at ways I can play around with photography, both outside with my camera or at home on the computer. The ability to take a photograph and make it look like a model is a pretty cool effect. Typically created with Tilt-Shift lenses, you can create your own Tilt-Shift type effect without spending hundreds of dollars.

The Tilt-Shift effect is for photos of objects that look miniature with a model likeness to them. Who isn’t fascinated with miniature representations of places they have been to, or objects that are of interest? I know I think it’s a pretty cool effect.

I am not going to show screenshots or a screencast but it does not take very long to produce a fake Tilt-Shift when using a program such as Photoshop. You should be familiar with quick-masks, gradients as well as the blur lens filter. That’s basically all I used to create my quick-n-dirty tilt-shift effect on my photos.

Royal Caribbean – Radiance of the Seas

I find that it is best to find a photo that has a bunch of objects and preferably shot from above, this helps give the effect of small miniatures. I’ve been playing with numerous photos and the ones that work best are of these type.

WestCoast Air – Twin Otter

If you click on either of the above photo it will overlay the larger image. Unfortunately I do not have a larger one of the cruise ship photo as when I saved it, I only saved it at a maximum of 800 pixel wide. At full resolution the tilt-shift effect, via Photoshop, was pretty impressive.

The idea behind using Photoshop to create a tilt-shift effect is pretty straight forward and does not involve many steps.

• Enter Quick-Mask Mode (‘q’ in Photoshop)
• Select the Gradient Tool (ensure Reflected Gradient is chosen)
• Draw a short line in the opposite direction you wish to have tilt-shifted. For the above photo I would center the Gradient tool in the middle of the plane, and drag upwards and a bit to the left.
• Leave Quick-Mask mode and choose Filters->Blur->Lens Blur. I typically just use the default settings.
• Apply the settings

Voila! Your fake tilt-shift effect should look pretty cool. You can also choose to increase the saturation a bit to give it a more toyish feel.

The actual tutorial I first tied out was over at TiltShiftPhotography.net. They have photos on the step-by-step process.