Screen Shots at You Noobs Got Owned!

Archive for the ‘Screen Shots’ Category

Tilt Shift Effect on Halo 3 Screenshots

Recently I have been doing some experimenting with ’tilt shift’ effects thru photoshop. With the right photo you can get some amazing effects. The basic goal is to take an image and make it appear is if it were a miniature model. Aerial views of large urban sprawls seem to work the best, so that got me thinking… I wonder how a Halo 3 screenshot would look.

Here’s my first few attempts. Nothing too amazing here, I know, but you can see the potential. I think to really pull off the effect there should be a gang of spartans in the screenshot. Scroll down to read a quick tutorial on how to duplicate this effect, then round up the hooligans you call friends, and try to make your own tilt shift halo pics.

Halo 3 Titl Shift ~ Click the pic for the Full Size Image

If you want to create your own, just fire up that pirated version of photoshop. You will also have to get some sweet screenshots together.. duh!

1. Open up your screenshot, switch to ‘Quick Mask Mode’
2. Select the Gradient Tool and draw a vertical line thru the area you want to highlight*

You can see in ‘tutorial image 01′ that the line is only about 30% of the total height of the screenshot I’m working with. The rest of the image will become blurred out.

Tutorial Image 01 - Choosing Quick Mask mode

3. Now switch out of ‘Quick Mask’ mode by toggling it off
4. You should now see the ‘marching ants’ just like tutorial image 2

Tutorial Image 02 - The Marching Ants of the Quick Mask

5. Apply a Lens Blur (Filter-> Blur -> Lens Blur)
6. Invert your Quick Mask (Select -> Inverse)
7. Sharpen the Highlighted area (Filter -> Sharpen -> Sharpen)
8. Deselect the Mask (Control + H)
9. Adjust Saturation (Image -> Adjust -> Hue/Saturation) (just crank it up to about 30)
10. Adjust Contrast (Image -> Adjust -> Brightness/Contrast)

Steps 7, 9 and 10 are where you will make some tweaks to the tutorial. Play with the settings a bit and see what you can create. A lot of this will depend on the image you select, and whether it has a lot of bright sun, or if it’s darker.

Experiment with putting a lot of things in the frame, close ups, explosions or whatever. Find a place to upload (you guys must know how to do that by now, right?) and post links in the comments section. If I see any good ones, I’ll post them on the main page.

Bookmark It