Tilt-shift miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature scale model. By distorting the focus of the photo, the artist simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered with macro lenses making the scene seem much smaller than it actually is. (source: Wikipedia article on Tilt-shift miniature faking)

This tutorial will guide you through the process of creating such an imagery in Photoshop. First of all you need to use a suitable photo, taken from above the subject. Think of the scenery, objects in it—as if they were on your table, and you were going to take the photo of it with a macro lens. That is also why it is good to search for the photos that have a harsh light (as if from a table lamp, for example).

Now let us move to the tutorial.
You can click on all the Photoshop screenshots for a bigger picture.

I have opened a chosen photo…

…and immidiately duplicated a layer, called it "copy" and continued to work only with it. I did this for two reasons. First is that I will have an original in case something goes wrong, and the second reason… well, I will explain that at the end of the tutorial.

…Then I press "Q" (for a quick mask mode), select a gradient tool (it could also be chosen by pressing "G" once or twice), and finally choose a "Reflected Gradient" mode. All three steps are shown by arrows above.

With the gradient tool selected, I press the mouse button and "draw a line" with it, accordig to the arrow above. …After releasing of the mouse button, there appears a red tint—mask…

…Then after pressing the "Q" button, Photoshop switches itself to the standard mode, where we stay for the rest of the tutorial…

…We select a "Lens Blur" filter…

…and adjust the "Radius" slider as we see fit. Clicking on the OK button delivers us a desired result.

Below are two 1:1 crops, so that you can see what the filter actually does:

Let me draw your attention to the above crop of a worker in a green helmet. I deliberately saved it for the later—to show you a common mistake that occures during the implementation.

When one makes a macro photo of something that stands on the sharp point in a shallow depth of field—the top of the object exhibits much less blur than the background behind it. Of course, the sharpness of the top varies depending on the lens and angle. You can observe the actual macro of a pin next to a ruler on the photo below.

Since we want to replicate that "I-have-small-world-on-my-table-and-want-to-make-a-macro-of-it" look, it is prefferrable to reduce blur on upper half of our object. To do so we duplicate the top layer named "copy" and switch it off (it is our backup of a tilt-shift photo we just produced). And on our layer named "copy", we start to erase the blurred upper torso of a worker with an "Eraser Tool" set in a Brush mode with soft edges. By doing so we reveal the unblurred portion of an original layer beneath. And that is the second reason why we needed to duplicate the layer, at the beginning of the tutorial

The final result then looks like this (click on it for a bigger photo).

Thank you for your time and attention. I hope some of you will find this tutorial useful and inspirational. Do not hesitate to send me your results to info@behindthephoto.org and I will post them here for others to see.