A short while back, I reviewed Bokeh from Alien Skin Software, an excellent Photoshop filter perfect for simulating tilt-shift photography. The filter offers the maximum amount of flexibility and features available to simulate tilt-shift photography with your existing images, as well as much more in the way of adding the bokeh effect to your photos. But if your need for simulated tilt-shift photography is limited, the $199 price tag might be too much. A friend of mine recently informed me about a new tool to simulate tilt-shift on your images, and it’s absolutely free. TiltShift Generator from Art&Mobile is available online, or as a downloadable Adobe AIR application. Both versions are identical, but the downloadable version is obviously going to be better because there’s no image uploading and downloading involved. While the control you get with this Air app pales in comparison to Alien Skin Bokeh, the tools you get are more than adequate for simple tilt-shift simulation. You have control over radial or linear plane blurring, strength of blur, color saturation and contrast, and vignetting. Simply drag your image into the preview area and click where you want the focus area to be in the image. The rest is just playing around to get the effect you want. The results are fairly decent for most needs, especially images destined for the Web (as seen in the image above). High resolution print images slow the app down quite a bit, though I found it to still work at acceptable speeds. TiltShift Generator works admirably for a free application. I’m not a huge fan of Adobe AIR applications, but in this case, it’s really all that is necessary.