Farseer - Salute 2012 sci-fi silver

[Orki]

This was an another entry on the Wamp forum for the annual Wamped! competition, where it won 1st in the sci-fi cat and runner up BoS. I took it to Salute too and I was overjoyed to see it grab silver in Sci-fi single!

There's some waffle under the pic in the gallery if anyone's interested too.

Cmon votey thing - http://www.coolminiornot.com/299890

Thanks for looking and I hope you like.

 

[Milosh]

That's some really nice freehand. Well done sir.

 

[marjedi]

Wauv that is just epic. Love the well thought out scheme and soft blends.

And that freehand is the best seen in a loooong time.

 

[freakinacage]

Nice work. Don't like the freehand myself, but it's the style - it's well done

 

[Orki]

Thank you for your kind words guys.

 

[Orki]

I've just been poking around after listening to Garshnak's advice in another thread regarding sharpening images.

I currently struggle with getting crisp photo's as I have no macro lens, and depth of field is a big issue for me at the mo, so a few tweaks later and the once-blurry detail is in focus! Well not all of it, but with the settings on hard enough to fix the really blurry bits it overcooked a lot of the pic, so this is a good middle ground I think.

It looks much closer to real life now, but i'm still not happy with the depth of field. I'm guessing there are more long winded ways to sharpen bits selectively, but for the mo i'm just happy that i'm on the right track. Once I can afford a macro lens hopefully my blurry issues will be a thing of the past.

Biiig thanks again to Garshnak!

The tweaked montage is here if anyone wishes to add any input - http://www.coolminiornot.com/307519

 

[Garshnak]

Haha, okay, no problem. Now my photoshop knowledge at least gets some use. And it looks like you didn't oversharpen it and used a good highpass range, that's good.

You could try adjusting your aperture (larger number = smaller aperture, you want smaller) on your camera to get a larger depth of field by the way. Also, moving away from the miniature slightly (of course requiring a larger focal land cropping the image afterwards), but that only works if you got a really good sensor on your cam which produces high resolution images (which has nothing to do with how much gigapixels it gets out of it!).

 

[Orki]

Thanks man.

Using Gimp (I know, I know...) I just sharpened up a layer using the default sharpen filter (about 40% on the slider), stacked it on top and reduced the opacity to around 30-40% I think it was. 50% opacity was too grainy on the smoother blends but it did make the extreme blurry bits pretty dang crisp. This was a nice middle ground where it crisped up the blurry details but didn't wreck the contrast etc.

I know of the manual tricks to help improve the dof issues, though this was the first mini I photographed with my cam when I got it iirc. I've definitely got a better understanding now, and I do think there's a little more to get out of it if it were in full manual mode rather than the program manual mode that I currently am sussing out. It's a maze inside those things though, but i'm getting there!

You can see that the dof is better in my Cersei piece once I realised I still had a bit of room to pull back with the tripod, but i'm getting to the limit of the kit lens for mini photography I think. Even a macro ring will do the job for the mo, but one day I would like a nice lens.

Thanks again!