… for Visual Effects

Tip #487: What’s a Tilt/Shift Blur

A Tilt-Shift Blur blurs an image in stages, simulating depth of field.

Gaussian blur on the left, Tilt-Shift blur on the right. The difference is at the bottom.

A tilt-shift blur simulates depth of field or the softening of edges with distance from a light source. Here’s what it looks like.

In this screen shot, the left side is a normal Gaussian blur. On the right, is a tilt-shift blur.

Notice in the image on the left, the entire image is blurred by the same amount. While, in the image on the right, the foreground is in focus, the mid-ground is softly out of focus and the background is deeply out of focust.

This effect more accurately simulates how a camera lens might interpret an image.

NOTE: Final Cut supports this effect using Blur > Focus. Premiere does not currently support this effect. The screen shot was created in Photoshop.