Where Everybody's Crazy

Christopher Phin has a lovely tutorial on making fake model photographs - pictures of scenes that look like they're minature models.

It's a pretty good tutorial, but there are two ways to improve it. First, the model look works best with very clear, consistent skies - you're trying to look as if the model is placed against a backsheet, so no clouds. In particular, a slight gradient and well-saturated, polarized blue skies look great. So my tip is to go to the Mediterranean in the summer, and wait. If you can't do that to get a clear sky, just make one yourself: select all the sky bits with a lasso or magic wand tool, and apply an Average blur filter.

The next thing is the lighting. As Christopher says:

But almost as important is the lighting in your photo. Models are usually lit by a lamp, so you'd expect to see sharp, directional shadows and bright, almost harsh light. That's partly why the picture of Charing Cross station, with its dull, omnidirectional light, doesn't work as well as the picture pointing towards the London Eye.

But hey, we've got Photoshop. We can create our own lighting. Go to Filters > Render > Lighting Effects, and dot a couple of lights around. Use an omni directional light for basic lighting, then a couple of spots to pick out interesting features. Ensure you've got the sliders set to "Matte" and "Plastic", like so:

You'll have to fiddle about with this a lot to get the feel right. Here are some of my experiments.

Venice	original
Hagia Sophia	original
Dubrovnic	original