Tilt-Shift Blur for After Effects

Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 5, 2019. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

Combine tilt shift with time lapse and the familiar miniature effect can be recreated. Although the effect is available as a filter in the blur gallery, anyone who wants to avoid the manual work for it in After Effects can now download the Tilt-Shift Blur Tool for free. The tool from The Drawing Room (Nol Honig) does not come as a script or plug-ins, but in an After Effects project file and is based on a combination of Camera Lens Blur, null objects, shape layers and a hidden Gradient Map, which are connected to one another via expressions. Of course, other interesting blur effects can also be created quickly with the tilt shift. Nol Honig used it for the following opening-titles project, for example:

Tilt Shift Interface

Following the Photoshop template, you can use four lines (Edge1, Center1, Center2, Edge2) to influence the distances and transitions of the tilt shift. The individual parameters can also be controlled via the “Tilt Shift Control” interface:

• UI On / Off checkbox with which all guide lines are (de)activated.
• UI-Opacity as a slider to adjust the opacity of the guide lines.
• Blur-Rotation controls the rotation of the tilt shift.
• Amount of Blur for regulating the blur strength.
• Invert Blur Map to reverse the blur effect
• Vignette On/Off
• Vignette Opacity

To the Download

As a CS6 and CC2019 project file. Download via Gumroad; enter “0” in the price field for a free download.