Have you ever noticed those great artsy pictures where the depth of field is so narrow that you only see a portion of the picture in focus, with the rest beautifully blurred away? With my Canon G9 10 MP digital camera and my Canon GL2 semi-pro camcorders, i've tried to play with the F-stop aperture settings to bring out that type of narrow focus field, but unless you have a lot of distance between the camera and the subject and an adequate telephoto lens, it can be a difficult effect to achieve, as you can see in this attempt here:

I never knew what that effect was called until Lifehacker posted an amazing piece about a website that provides free TiltShift image processing. The direct URL for the TiltShift processing page is http://labs.artandmobile.com/tiltshift/

You can adjust an impressive number of parameters, including the size and position of the focus field, saturation, contrast, and several others. The temptation is to really overdo things because the results can be so stunning. Here's the same picture as above, post TiltShift processing:

Really makes the item in the foreground pop out, doesn't it?

Here's another fun comparison - the before picture:

And now, after TiltShift-ing:

Neat how you can not only make the focus, but also the colors pop out, eh?

One drawback with the website is that it can't process image files that are too large, so while this wouldn't be appropriate for any oversized publications, it's more than adequate for website images.

Can you tell i'm having way too much fun with this? Thanks, Lifehacker!