★★★★★ review for TiltShift!

This raving review (in German) by user Almigurt made my day:

Schnell, einfach und großartig im Ergebnis! Jeden Penny wert!      ★★★★★
Ein ganze Weile schon suche ich nach einer guten Tilt Shift App für den Mac – und es sieht so aus, als hätte ich sie endlich gefunden! Tilt Shift kommt mit einem reduzierten und großartigen Userinterface – und noch besseren Ergebnissen. Endlich auch auf dem Mac eine gute App, die Miniatreffekte schnell und einfach in seine Bilder zu bekommen! 🙂
by Almigurt – Version 1.2 – Jan 7, 2013

Contacting a developer in case of a problem before writing a bad review or posting a positive review if you like an app makes all our lives more enjoyable! We’re all just humans and as such sometimes make mistakes and always love getting encouraging feedback for what we do.

System Requirements Glitch in version 1.2

If you happen to read this before purchasing TiltShift or TiltShift Lite on the Mac App Store:

There is a small bug in version 1.2 that yields in wrong system requirements being displayed on the App Store page. TiltShift and TiltShift Lite do require OS X Lion (10.7.4) or later, despite the fact that the App Store lists 10.6.6 as requirements.

A version 1.2.1 update fixing this bug and featuring a few other improvements has been submitted to the Mac App Store on Dec. 28th for approval.

Available on the Mac App Store!

Mac App StoreTiltShift is once again available on the Mac App Store. It is an app for computer generated tilt-shift photography. It allows you to create fake miniature versions of regular photos, simulating the effect of expensive tilt-shift lenses.

You can define an arbitrary position for the virtual focal plane and setup its properties using an intuitive visual interface. Additional controls for saturation, contrast, brightness, sharpness and vignette let you create amazing fake miniatures.

TiltShift will be back soon

You may have wondered what happened to TiltShift and TiltShift Lite.

Stefan Hafeneger, the original creator of TiltShift had to give up the apps. As we’ve known each other for a while, we agreed that I would watch over them, make sure they work and even evolve them as time permits.

We were planning to make the transition as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately we had to learn after months of trying — mostly waiting actually — that it is still impossible to transfer apps on the Mac App Store from one developer to another one.

The only viable option was for Stefan to remove the apps from sale. I took the source code and resubmitted new apps under my own account. After Stefan went ahead and completely deleted the products in his account I was also able to re-acquire the original names, TiltShift and TiltShift Lite.

TiltShift has already been approved by Apple, TiltShift Lite will hopefully follow any day now. Watch this space to learn when both will be available.

Ponte Scaligero

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This is Ponte Scaligero as viewed from Torre dei Lamberti in Verona. The photo was shot with a Nikon D90 and a rather cheap Nikon 28-200VR lens.

Original photo as shot

As there is quite a distance between camera and bridge there almost no depth of field in the RAW photo. Here’s the photo as it came out after 1 minute of tweaking just using TiltShift:

Photo after applying some fake miniature effect in TiltShift.

Breaking Waves

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As everyone knows, this is Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. If you haven’t been to Baker Beach before I recommend doing so. It’s a nice calm place, at least in winter time, and you get a lovely low view of the bridge.

Original photo as shot

The photo was shot with a Nikon D70 and a Nikkor VR 18-200 lens back in January 2008 when we visited for Macworld. It was the first year after iPhone was introduced and we came to have meetings and conduct a small education event about stop-motion animation using iStopMotion at the Zeum. The place is now called Children’s Creativity Museum, a wonderful interactive arts and film museum for kids of all ages directly at the corner opposite to Moscone West.

The original photo I took is arguably a bit boring, mostly due to a lack of clear focus. Unfortunately I had not put more thought into the shot and used f/13 at about 120mm, so most of the scene is somewhat sharp. However, the wave in the front makes a quite nice theme and thanks to TiltShift I was able to put some additional focus on the wave and blur the bridge for an unusual touch. For additional drama I applied a rather strong vignette of 0.5.

Photo after applying some fake miniature effect in TiltShift.