{"id":4095,"date":"2016-03-01T02:42:37","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T07:42:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/?p=4095"},"modified":"2022-07-01T18:00:37","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T22:00:37","slug":"sergeant-tolek-shows-how-to-photo-minis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2016\/03\/sergeant-tolek-shows-how-to-photo-minis\/","title":{"rendered":"Sergeant Tolek Shows How To Photo Minis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fantastically, several people\u00a0harassed me at PAGE’s<\/a>\u00a040k narrative event\u00a0last week about using my Sergeant Titus model given that in a separate, parallel narrative he was captured by Chaos<\/a> and is most likely now in pretty rough\u00a0shape. So, enter Sgt Tolek, new leader of the Kingbreakers’<\/a> third tactical squad:<\/p>\n

\"tolek-front\"<\/a> \"tolek-back\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Doing just one infantry model\u00a0like this is not super efficient, but it was nice to just get a guy done quickly, in contrast to the literal piles of have completed models I have on my painting table at the moment.<\/p>\n

I’m happy with how he turned out.\u00a0He’s a bit more detailed and better done than\u00a0Sgt Titus and his squad, but matches them more than well enough to take the place on the table of the woe-befallen Titus:<\/p>\n

\"titus\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Light!<\/h2>\n

I borrowed Matt’s<\/a>\u00a0photo booth to give one a try,\u00a0and I think\u00a0the\u00a0photos\u00a0came out super well. The booth’s not critical, up until this point I’ve done fine with some paper glued to\u00a0cardboard boxes with the sides cut. But the booth\u00a0does really eliminate fiddling to\u00a0ensure\u00a0a totally white background, and\u00a0softens the light.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160229_201503\"<\/a>

Photo shoot in progress! The room is actually fully lit, the booth is just so bright that my phone camera’s auto-adjust effectively darkened it.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"IMG_20160229_202028\"<\/a>

Snapping pics!<\/p><\/div>\n

I could use slightly\u00a0brighter lights to really push through the diffusing screens,\u00a0and a couple more of them to hit both sides and the top, but the\u00a0daylight bulbs\u00a0I do have worked well enough. They’re just bulbs with a high white\/blue temperature\u00a0rating that I picked up at Home Depot at some point.<\/p>\n

Although lately I’ve been using my smartphone for a lot of in-game miniatures pictures, I used my Canon S90<\/a> for these detailed portraits.\u00a0The optical zoom helps deal with depth of field issues with weapons pointing forward and such, the view screen makes it easy to position models with both hands while monitoring the shot, and\u00a0it’s easier to do a lot more manual settings adjustments. I used manual mode to get real control over the settings: Macro focusing, ISO 80 to gather a lot of\u00a0light and detail, and adjusted the aperture until the models looked bright and clear. To eliminate jitter from my hand with such a low ISO\u00a0I\u00a0simply placed the camera on a small card game box about the right height to get a head-on view of the models.<\/p>\n

All of that produced a photo like this:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The original, untouched photo.<\/p><\/div>\n

GIMP<\/h2>\n

That’s already pretty good, but from there I tweaked them using the open source GIMP<\/a>. The initial step is\u00a0automatic white balancing and color enhancing. You can do that easily from the menus (Colors\u2192 Auto \u2192 White Balance & Color Enhance). I use a simple\u00a0GIMP script<\/a> so I can\u00a0batch process a ton of photos at once:<\/p>\n

\r\n(define (batch-white-balance pattern)\r\n  (let* ((filelist (cadr (file-glob pattern 1))))\r\n    (while (not (null? filelist))\r\n           (let* ((filename (car filelist))\r\n                  (image (car (gimp-file-load RUN-NONINTERACTIVE\r\n                                              filename filename)))\r\n                  (drawable (car (gimp-image-get-active-layer image)))\r\n                 )\r\n\r\n                 (gimp-levels-stretch drawable)\r\n                 (plug-in-color-enhance RUN-NONINTERACTIVE\r\n                                        image drawable)\r\n\r\n;                 (gimp-brightness-contrast drawable 25 25)\r\n                 \r\n;                 (plug-in-unsharp-mask RUN-NONINTERACTIVE\r\n;                                       image drawable 5.0 0.5 0.0)\r\n                 \r\n                 (gimp-file-save RUN-NONINTERACTIVE\r\n                             image drawable filename filename)\r\n                 (gimp-image-delete image)\r\n            )\r\n            (set! filelist (cdr filelist))\r\n    )\r\n  )\r\n)\r\n<\/pre>\n
Note that the script has lines commented out to up the brightness and sharpen the image, unnecessary in this setup. Again, you can totally do these operations through the menus.  But if you want to manipulate large numbers of photos, you should look into how to run a GIMP script like this.<\/p>\n
That white balancing and color enhancing produces an even better photo, like this:<\/p>\n
\"After<\/a>
After white balancing and color enhancing in GIMP.<\/p><\/div>\n
From\u00a0that point there’s a couple simple steps to produce the image up top. First I use the fuzzy\u00a0select color-based wand (key U) to select all the white background.\u00a0For these photos I used a threshold of 30.<\/p>\n
\"Selecting<\/a>
Selecting the white background.<\/p><\/div>\n
Then\u00a0I inverted the selection to be the model rather than the background, cut it, and pasted it\u00a0to a new image. If there’s any specks of dirt, strong shadows, or seams in the background the select won’t\u00a0encompass them and you’ll have to manually\u00a0crop the image (key Shift-C). Interior holes, e.g.,\u00a0in the crook of this guy’s arm, also need\u00a0to be selected and cut using the fuzzy\u00a0select color-based wand.<\/p>\n
\"Screenshot_2016-03-01_02-04-41\"<\/a><\/p>\n
I then resized the canvas by 110% to put some\u00a0border space around the model (Image \u2192 Canvas Size \u2192 Percent \u2192 Lock Ratio \u2192 110% \u2192 Center). In the past I usually used\u00a0a plain\u00a0white background, but now realize\u00a0a complementary gradient actually\u00a0shows\u00a0the colors better. So I added a new white layer (Layer \u2192 New Layer \u2192 White), moved it down under the model (Layer \u2192 Stack \u2192 Layer to Bottom), and applied a gradient using the Blend tool (key L) to get the final product.<\/p>\n
\"The<\/a>
The final product.<\/p><\/div>\n
Action!<\/h2>\n
The photo booth’s a nice touch and the nice-ish\u00a0camera very handy, but the key thing here is having a couple bright daylight\u00a0bulbs, and doing some basic photo manipulation. The bulbs are inexpensive\u00a0and the\u00a0GIMP is free, so there’s no real barrier to replicating this process with a smartphone camera or such for similar results.\u00a0Smile for the camera!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fantastically, several people\u00a0harassed me at PAGE’s\u00a040k narrative event\u00a0last week about using my Sergeant Titus model given that in a separate, parallel narrative he was captured by Chaos and is most likely now in pretty rough\u00a0shape. So, enter Sgt Tolek, new leader of the Kingbreakers’ third tactical squad: Doing just one infantry model\u00a0like this is not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[408],"tags":[257,274,15,37,135],"class_list":["post-4095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-workshop","tag-featured","tag-miniatures","tag-painting","tag-photography","tag-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4095"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4120,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095\/revisions\/4120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}