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Making It Miniature
11 June 2020
There's something elevating about turning a bland landscape image into a Madurodam. It makes you feel gigantic, a master of the universe.
Miniature Town. Captured with a Nikon D300 and 18-200mm Nikkor at 62mm (93mm equivalent) at f11, 1/60 second and ISO 400. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw and Nik Collection 3 Perspective.
Well, until the phone rings anyway. Then it's back to I-need-that-yesterday land where your gigantic dimensions resemble Jonathan Swift's Gulliver more than any master of Madurodam.
Still, for a moment, it's worth the trouble.
And it's no trouble at all, we found, with the Nik Collection 3's new Perspective module, which includes a Miniature Effect. In our recent review of the Nik Collection 3 we touched on the new addition to the suite of powerful plug-ins.
Perspective. The new Nik Collection module includes a Miniature Effect.
One click to turn the effect on and the plug-in dropped the effect on our image. Another click on the tool button allowed us to drag the effect into place and adjust the angle. And that was all it took really.
The little town below us was suddenly rendered in miniature.
The effect blurs the background and foreground much like a macro lens might. And that's the source of the illusion.
The Perspective plug-in offers a few variations for the blur shape in addition to its falloff and angle.
You can select a
BlurofCircular, Circular Soft, Circular Sharp, 6 Blades, 8 Blades, 9 Blades. And disableSymmetric PositionandSymmetric Blur, too, to control the two defocused areas independently.As the screen shot above shows, it was no trouble at all to get just what we wanted.
Which, frankly, made us feel pretty gigantic.