Fake a miniature model by keeping one strip sharp and blurring everything above and below it. Set the band, feather and blur, and download without uploading.
Makes a fully blurred copy of the photo, then blends between the sharp original and the blurred copy row by row. A band you position stays sharp, a feather zone fades out, and the rest takes the full blur. Because real macro lenses have very shallow focus, the brain reads a photo with this narrow focus band as a tiny model, which is why the effect is called miniature or diorama. The band can run horizontally across the frame or vertically up it.
A 4000 × 3000 photo of a street market taken from a fourth-floor window: band width 25 percent, position 55 percent (on the stalls), blur 70, feather 15. The stalls stay crisp, the road in front and the rooftops behind soften to about 14 px of blur, and the market looks like a model railway scene. Boosting saturation afterwards with Change Saturation by 20 to 30 percent completes the toy look, since model paint is brighter than real life.
It works best on photos taken from above, looking down at streets, harbours, stadiums, beaches or train yards, with the subject in a band across the frame. It fails on eye-level portraits and on scenes with nothing in the foreground or background to blur. Use the vertical band for tall subjects like towers and cranes. If you want a plain background blur without the miniature illusion, Blur Image has a Tilt-shift type with a fixed band and also nine other blurs.
Position puts the centre of the sharp band as a percentage from the top (or left). Band width is how much stays sharp; 20 to 35 percent sells the miniature look, 50 and above is just gentle depth. Blur strength maps to a pixel radius that scales with image size so a 1200 px web image and a 6000 px DSLR frame blur by a similar visual amount; the exact pixels show in the section header. Feather is the width of the fade from sharp to blurred. On large photos a quick preview appears first and the exact result replaces it a moment later.
Why does the preview change twice after I move a slider? On photos over about 1.5 megapixels the tool shows a fast hard-edged version immediately, then swaps in the smooth feathered result when the full pass finishes.
Which photos give the best miniature effect? Ones shot from a high vantage point looking down, with small repeated objects such as cars, people, boats or market stalls, and a subject that runs in a band across the frame.
Can the sharp band be diagonal or a circle? No. This tool offers a horizontal or vertical band. Rotate the photo first with Rotate Image if the subject runs at an angle, then rotate the result back and crop.
Does the blur strength mean pixels? Not directly. The 0 to 100 value becomes a blur radius that scales with the longest edge of the image; the header shows the pixel radius actually used.