MobiColour RESULT: MC #126 Theme: Tilt Shift - June 25-July 1, 2018

RoseCat

RoseCat

MobiStaff
MobiStaff
MobiSupporter
Real Name
Catherine
Device
iPhone 14 Pro Max
Onsite
Project Page
color
[kuhl-er]

noun
1. the quality of an object or substance with respect to light reflected by the object, usually determined visually by measurement of hue, saturation, and brightness of the reflected light; saturation or chroma; hue.

adjective
1. involving, utilizing, yielding, or possessing color: a color TV.
_____________________

Welcome to MobiTog's color Challenge #126! The rules are easy: Post your mobile photography color images here - LIMIT OF 3 IMAGES IN ONE POST, preferably 1 image per post. No black & white, no shades of grey, just BOLD BRIGHT COLORS! Or, SOFT PASTEL COLORS. Whatever strikes your fancy, or your color palette. :D

The challenge will last one week, and then the winner of the prior challenge will choose the winner of the current challenge, who will then decide if there will be a theme to the next challenge or not, and what that theme will be. :sneaky:

Please see the Rules and Guidelines for MobiChallenges posted HERE.
Check out our previous winners in the Gallery HERE.

Let's electrify this space with C O L O R !!

_________________________

Theme: Tilt Shift

The judge for this challenge is sinnerjohn !
 
sinnerjohn said:
Coming off the back of an excellent no-theme week I thought I'd better set one this week.........so
This week's theme is........TILT-SHIFT
Click to expand...
This will be interesting. The first time I saw a tilt-shift app I was so excited, and then so disappointed when I realized it was entirely fake. The feature called tilt-shift on smartphones gives people a completely backwards impression of what tilt-shift is all about. The smartphone version is actually a simulation of the small world or miniature layout effect of reduced depth of field. It is exactly the opposite of how tilt-shift really works on a professional view camera using the Scheimpflug Principle. Even the more limited control offered by a tilt-shift lens on a DSLR using a provides impressive increases in depth-of-field and perspective distortion correction. I have a shift lens for a dslr. To create tilt effects requires physically tilting the lens relative to the sensor plane.
All the apps really do is apply blur to a selective area of the image, usually on either side of an area where sharpness will be preserved and narrowing the relative area of sharpness. It might be better named inverse tilt-shift. It is impossible for the tilt-shift apps to increase depth-of-field. It isn’t possible to simulate the way tilt-shift was normally used with view cameras, that being to tilt the lens in relation to the film such that the plane of focus could be made to match the subject plane, giving endless depth of field. Imagine you are 2 feet from one end of a fence that tracks diagonally across your image and disappearing into the distance. Using tilt you could angle your lens towards the fence such that your plane of focus, even at at wide aperture, would fall right along the face of the fence, rendering it in sharp focus from the closest fence post to the most distant point.
The shift aspect of tilt-shift is simply perspective correction done in-camera before exposure. Apps like SKRWT and SKEW can do perspective or tilt corrections quite well to existing photos. As far as I know there are no apps that can do perspective correction before exposure, yet the sensors inside smartphones should be able to make it possible to correct perspective distortion at the time of shooting.

I guess it’s obvious enough that there aren’t any apps that can actually improve an image (besides the usual image tuning), while there are tons made to degrade the image in many ways. If your image isn’t in focus there isn’t any way to fix that, but it is easy enough to make a sharp image blurry. There’s no way to put detail back in burned-out highlights but there are lots of apps to add textures and overlays to an image to help conceal the fact that your highlights really have no detail. There’s no way for apps to create the tilt-shift improvements to an image so they do the opposite.

Tilt-shift goes back to the film era, long before perspective correction was possible in digital images. I used to use these corrections routinely for commercial work with my 4x5 view camera but also for landscape work on my own time. I still have 2- 4x5 view cameras used for this type of work. For professional film applications it was often necessary to correct optical problems such as perspective distortion and limited depth of field before the film was exposed - since there was no way at that time to correct those deficiencies after the film was developed.
Tilt literally means tilting the lens axis in relation to the film plane, which allowed changing the plane of focus to match the subject plane, greatly improving the area of sharpness in the image.
Shift means physically moving the lens to the left or right or up or down in relation to the normal centre axis but still parallel to the film plane. This is how the typical perspective distortions were corrected. In the case of a building, looking up at it causes the sides of the building to appear slanted inwards instead of parallel and vertical. Instead of tipping the camera upwards to include the top of the building you keep the camera level, with the film plane parallel to the face of the building, and raise just the lens. That allows the camera to look up without creating distortion.
Making either shift or tilt movements requires a lens with much greater covering power than on a fixed lens camera.
 
sinnerjohn said:
Coming off the back of an excellent no-theme week I thought I'd better set one this week.........so
This week's theme is........TILT-SHIFT
Click to expand...
What Ann said! Enlight has a tilt-shift effect. Any other apps that people know of?

From what I've seen, these tilt-shift effects seem to work best if you're looking down on something at an angle (not directly overhead as in a deepop hover)
 
Here is an image that simulates tilt. That is, tilting the lens axis forward (in this case) to make the plane of focus lie parallel to the subject plane. There is no obvious perspective distortion that would benefit from using shift.
F70B3AA8-99FC-4EB7-8354-7BE1307368D7.jpeg


This 2nd picture shows the best depth-of-field that can be accomplished with the standard iPhone lens. You could call this, un-tilted.
31143064-A111-48B0-85D1-0C7EB84E52BA.jpeg


In actuality there is no way to create a tilt effect like the top image on a smartphone with a single exposure. Instead, it is achieved through focus stacking.


Here is a photo showing typical perspective distortion caused by angling the camera upwards and not aligning the camera’s sensor plane with the subject. plane. This is where the shift movement would be used.
E768B323-EACD-49BF-9E36-E8377C780E95.jpeg


This simulates how shift would be used to correct perspective distortion, in this case by SKEW.
122A09F7-7D12-496C-B875-F20BDE5B2659.jpeg



And here is that misnamed pseudo tilt-shift effect made by smartphone apps, in this case, Affinity. Actually, shift plays no part in this type of effect. Only tilt, or more precisely, reverse tilt.
5090940F-FC4D-4193-B2C6-11F9B3BC1AF7.jpeg
 
terse said:
What Ann said! Enlight has a tilt-shift effect. Any other apps that people know of?

From what I've seen, these tilt-shift effects seem to work best if you're looking down on something at an angle (not directly overhead as in a deepop hover)
Click to expand...
Snapseed has shift, except they misnamed it tilt.
Pixelmator has an effect named Miniaturize. That name makes sense.
In Affinity it is called Depth of Field Blur. Well named, too.
Hypelight has the Tilt-shift effect.


You can create this effect in any app where you can make a selection and apply a good amount of feathering, invert the selection, and then apply Gaussian blur to the selected area. Sometimes the selection first has to be converted to a mask.

There’s an app called Glass Tilt Shift but it doesn’t create the blurred effect. Instead it applies various adjustments like Glow, Highlights, Contrast, Colour, Grain. I can’t see that it has anything to do with Tilt-shift.
 
Last edited:
FundyBrian said:
This will be interesting. The first time I saw a tilt-shift app I was so excited, and then so disappointed when I realized it was entirely fake. The feature called tilt-shift on smartphones gives people a completely backwards impression of what tilt-shift is all about. The smartphone version is actually a simulation of the small world or miniature layout effect of reduced depth of field. It is exactly the opposite of how tilt-shift really works on a professional view camera using the Scheimpflug Principle. Even the more limited control offered by a tilt-shift lens on a DSLR using a provides impressive increases in depth-of-field and perspective distortion correction. I have a shift lens for a dslr. To create tilt effects requires physically tilting the lens relative to the sensor plane.
All the apps really do is apply blur to a selective area of the image, usually on either side of an area where sharpness will be preserved and narrowing the relative area of sharpness. It might be better named inverse tilt-shift. It is impossible for the tilt-shift apps to increase depth-of-field. It isn’t possible to simulate the way tilt-shift was normally used with view cameras, that being to tilt the lens in relation to the film such that the plane of focus could be made to match the subject plane, giving endless depth of field. Imagine you are 2 feet from one end of a fence that tracks diagonally across your image and disappearing into the distance. Using tilt you could angle your lens towards the fence such that your plane of focus, even at at wide aperture, would fall right along the face of the fence, rendering it in sharp focus from the closest fence post to the most distant point.
The shift aspect of tilt-shift is simply perspective correction done in-camera before exposure. Apps like SKRWT and SKEW can do perspective or tilt corrections quite well to existing photos. As far as I know there are no apps that can do perspective correction before exposure, yet the sensors inside smartphones should be able to make it possible to correct perspective distortion at the time of shooting.

I guess it’s obvious enough that there aren’t any apps that can actually improve an image (besides the usual image tuning), while there are tons made to degrade the image in many ways. If your image isn’t in focus there isn’t any way to fix that, but it is easy enough to make a sharp image blurry. There’s no way to put detail back in burned-out highlights but there are lots of apps to add textures and overlays to an image to help conceal the fact that your highlights really have no detail. There’s no way for apps to create the tilt-shift improvements to an image so they do the opposite.

Tilt-shift goes back to the film era, long before perspective correction was possible in digital images. I used to use these corrections routinely for commercial work with my 4x5 view camera but also for landscape work on my own time. I still have 2- 4x5 view cameras used for this type of work. For professional film applications it was often necessary to correct optical problems such as perspective distortion and limited depth of field before the film was exposed - since there was no way at that time to correct those deficiencies after the film was developed.
Tilt literally means tilting the lens axis in relation to the film plane, which allowed changing the plane of focus to match the subject plane, greatly improving the area of sharpness in the image.
Shift means physically moving the lens to the left or right or up or down in relation to the normal centre axis but still parallel to the film plane. This is how the typical perspective distortions were corrected. In the case of a building, looking up at it causes the sides of the building to appear slanted inwards instead of parallel and vertical. Instead of tipping the camera upwards to include the top of the building you keep the camera level, with the film plane parallel to the face of the building, and raise just the lens. That allows the camera to look up without creating distortion.
Making either shift or tilt movements requires a lens with much greater covering power than on a fixed lens camera.
Click to expand...
:eek: So much to learn, so little time!
 
Great technical info from Brian as ever, I bow to your photographic experience :notworthy:

However I think a lot of smartphone photography is about faking it one way or another. Fake polaroids, fake film filters, fake tilt-shift, fake depth of field, the list is endless.
Most of the big apps have a tilt effect including the ever popular snapseed.
I actually like the 'misnamed pseudo tilt-shift effect made by smartphone apps' so don't be afraid people to post away, lets have some fun :thumbs:
 
FundyBrian said:
Snapseed has shift, except they misnamed it tilt.
Pixelmator has an effect named Miniaturize. That name makes sense.
In Affinity it is called Depth of Field Blur. Well named, too.
Hypelight has the Tilt-shift effect.


You can create this effect in any app where you can make a selection and apply a good amount of feathering, invert the selection, and then apply Gaussian blur to the selected area. Sometimes the selection first has to be converted to a mask.

There’s an app called Glass Tilt Shift but it doesn’t create the blurred effect. Instead it applies various adjustments like Glow, Highlights, Contrast, Colour, Grain. I can’t see that it has anything to do with Tilt-shift.
Click to expand...
In Snapseed you can do it using Blur too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom