Beyond Tilt Shift effect is the whole science of blurring out an area of a photo for an added effect… it’s called Bokeh. Tilt Shift is the focus of a single point to fool the eye into ‘seeing’ a depth that isn’t there. Bokeh is more about the effect of a blurred area causing a feeling for the photograph. The ‘out of focus’ area can be strong or light for different effects.

An app that goes beyond ‘simple’ Tilt Shift is SynthCam. Rather than just blurring everything outside of an area on a single photograph, SynthCam takes grabs 30 frames a second to see what your eye sees. The app relies on you aiming it’s camera at a object and moving side to side a slight bit (not forward/back!) over the ‘in focus’ object so SynthCam can learn the distance of that object. If you have multiple items you want in focus, you can do the process several times for SynthCam to learn each item’s depth. This mean a complicated object like a flower or a person can be central to the final image instead of a circle or blocked area. It has taken some practice to learn the amount of movement to get the right result, but this is digital so it doesn’t cost anything to take a lot of image attempts.