Inspired by Adobe’s Digital Imaging Evangelist, Julieanne Kost, I’ve been playing around with focal plane blur techniques in Photoshop CS4. What you can do with this is mimic (to some extent) the effect from a tilt-shift lens where you shift the focal plane.
Here’s one of my first test images:
Original is below:
Here are the steps from the video.
Basically, to create a more realistic photo, one would like to use the Lens Blur, but you can only apply a lens blur to a rasterized mask vs a Smart Object where you would create the gradient blur. I’m guessing most people stop at the gradient blur, but this technique adds a finer quality to the finished product, stead of a hazy look to the image.