LightningPaul

The crowd walking in Louvre in Paris, France. Shot in the entrance in the pyramid which gives you an overview of different entrances to the museums.


TECH-INFO: by leaning on the balustrade I managed to make a steady shot with a longer exposure because the goal was to capture moving people. The tilt-shift lens effect (= the selective focus) is achieved using Focal Point 2 of OnOneSoftware (you get a 25% reduction if you buy before Jan 28). This tool is incredible powerful to render all kind of bokeh. You really can define the number of blades, lens quality, blade curvature, rotation, planar or round. With a simple device, called bug, you can determine the place, size and other parameters of the focus plane. There is also a focal brush for fine-tuning. On their website you have lots of video tutorials which is great. I have been watching all those of Focal Point 2, just to understand what the possibilities of this tool are.
Before starting with this tool, I first enhanced contrasts, globally and locally, in CS4 (and of course, RAW conversion in DxO Optics Pro).

In Photoshop I discovered, read about and experimented with smart objects and smart layers. The latter is extremely useful. Normally I used a filter only on a merged stack of layers, hence making it very cumbersome if you alter the layers in the stack afterwards (because you need to re-apply the filter and remember the settings). But in this case I put all the layers in a smart object. On this object I was able to use filters, like Focal Point 2. Any time I can re-apply or re-edit the filter on the smart object and any time I can work on the layers inside the smart object. Afterwards the filter is automatically applied. Extremely handy.

Unfortunately, the edits of the focal brush are not re-applied in the smart filter or when re-opening Focal Point to alter the settings. I assume this is a bug and I already contacted support.