Selective Blurring with TiltShift Generator and Adobe AIR

I found a fun little application this past weekend called TiltShift Generator from Art&Mobile.com that I thought I would share with you.  I’m not sure where I ran across it but as free applications go, this one is pretty slick.  First of all it is an Adobe Air application.  For those of you not familiar with AIR it is, according to Adobe, “a cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash®, and Adobe Flex® technologies to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop.” That means that you can run AIR programs on your desktop no matter what operating system you are using.  It’s also the same technology that Adobe uses for its Photoshop.com online image editing program (formerly known as Photoshop Express).

To run the TiltShift Generator you will first need to download the Adobe AIR application for your particular operating system (Click here).  Next, just go to the Art&Mobile.com website to download the application or just click this link to download. Once downloaded, just double-click on the file to install.

Once the program is installed and running, you will find a pretty simple dialog box.  The first step is to open a file by clicking on the OPEN button and then selecting an image.  The program is made for mobile and web-based imagery so pictures that are larger than about 1600 pixels may not process properly.  Once the image is open, you need to determine what type of blur effect you want to use, Linear or Radial.

For this image, I selected Linear and then clicked on the image to set the center point.  Then I used the small grabber handle to determine the size and angle of the blur.  The strength was set by adjusting a slider on the left-hand panel along with the radius.  Once the blur was adjusted there were several other image adjustments that were made to enhance the effect such as Saturation, Contrast, Brightness, and Vignetting. When done, I simply set the JPEG quality and then saved the image.

Before TiltShift

After TiltShift

Here’s an example of how to use a radial blur pattern for a completely different look.

Applying a radial blur

Here’s a look at the file after using this effect for some selective focus.

After applying some radial blur

Now here’s one other cool thing about this program, it’s also available as an iPhone App.  Just follow this link to go to the iTunes Store and download it for only 99¢ (if the link does not work properly, simply open iTunes and then search for TiltShift in the App section).To get more information about TiltShift Generator and see some sample images, make sure you check out the Art&Mobile website.

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