Real photo, tabletop feel.

No. The blur composite runs on a canvas in your browser. Your photo never touches our servers — we don't run an image pipeline at all.

Real miniatures are photographed with shallow depth of field — only a thin slice is in focus. Tilt-shift mimics that on full-scale scenes by aggressively blurring everything outside a chosen focus band, then bumping saturation and contrast for that 'plastic toy' richness. The brain reads the focus drop-off as 'small subject, close camera' even though the scene is huge.

Horizontal band: classic city/street tilt-shift, blur top and bottom. Vertical slice: tall subjects (waterfalls, buildings), blur left and right. Radial spot: single subject in the center (portrait, product), blur outward in a circle.

Real miniature scenes (model trains, dioramas) have intense saturation because the paint is fresh and the lighting is bright. Bumping saturation on a real-world photo cues the brain to read it as a model, even before the blur registers. Contrast adds the same effect — strong shadows feel 'staged'.

Move the focus position to where your subject actually is — default is the middle, but a cityscape's people might be in the bottom third. Then narrow the focus band so the blur kicks in tighter to your subject. Smaller focus band = more pronounced miniature effect.

It can, but the effect is muted because real close-ups already have shallow depth of field — adding more blur on top can look exaggerated. Tilt-shift sells best on wide-scale scenes where reality has too *much* depth and you're forcing it shallower.