After a welcome to the (hopefully) lots of new viewers from the Miro Guide, I continue to shrink a real building site to a model train scale.
An important tool for this is the Focus Blur plugin. The homepage needs some assistance in translation from Japanese to English – are you able to help?
The Focus Blur plugin needs a “Depth Map”, a grayscale image which defines the amount of blur in each part of the image. Rob A has made a tutorial about making a believable depth map. It’s not enough to make a simple gradient, you have to keep things with the same distance to the focal plane on the same level of gray and make the gradients follow the planes in the image. And here my subect turned out to be too complicated. My result is not as good as I wanted.
If I wanted to do this again I would choose a different subject and camera position. Higher up and farther away and so including more stuff. And I would look out for regular shapes in the area to make building a depth map easier.
(EDIT 04/03/09) A much better example than I was able to produce was made by the above mentioned Rob A. He describes his process in the forum thread.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.
Tags: focus blur, miniaturisation, tilt shift
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Your’ voice is beautiful and makes me go to sleep. so soothing.
You should make podcasts that help people sleep, i am not being offensive in anyway, i am just genuinly saying your voice is soothing and relaxing. Well done.
And a TOC:
http://meetthegimp.org/episode-097-shrinking-2/
Episode 097: Shrinking! (2)
00:18 Welcome from Rolf
00:30 Introduction to Gimp and Meet the Gimp for Miro visitors
03:36 Reviewing the last shrinking episode
05:20 Focus blur plug-in from the GIMP Plug-In Registry
06:25 Experimenting with the focus blur plug-in
11:40 Rob A’s focus blur tutorial
12:17 Making a depth map
17:27 Summary
19:59 The End
Nice tutorials, Keep going
(a Miro user
Hey,
just watched this episode and I think you might have achieved a better result by setting your focus plane right. Because as you said in the previous tutorial it has to be parallel to the camera sensor.
You are shooting from above and to the right, so the plane should be leaning to the back (you corrected this in the beginning of this video) and it should be rotated to the left foreground (shooting from the right! ). Yours is rotated the opposite direction, thus placing the sand hill and the boards left of it in the focus.
I didn’t try this I just noticed!
Keep up the good work!