Help with blackening a background
- Thread starter gohkm
- Start date
AndyG
Active member
Big sheet of black paper in a "scoop" behind the diorama. Don't bother using paint or gimp as it always looks funy and it's best to photograph the set as is. They're are plenty of articles on photography on this site that tell you how to set up the camera background and also go into how to use gimp or photoshop etc. my personal favourite is the one by tommie soule simple but highly effective.
ten ball
Active member
First, as already mentioned, you're better off with minimum photo editing. Just use a clean, curved background sheet of paper. It is way less work to set up a clean picture in the first place than clean it up later.
But if you have to edit things with Gimp, here are a few steps. I am by no means a Gimp/photo shop expert.
First, I grabbed you image from photobucket and cropped it to just top view.
High level, you need to use a select tool to grab only the portion of the image you want to change. Select it, grow your selection a little, and feather (soft the edges) of the selection, and then fill it.
There are a few tools for this. The easiest, if there is enough contrast, is the Fuzzy Select (Magic Wand icon). It selects portions of your image that are similar in color to where you've clicked. This works great if the contrast between the foreground and background is high. However, your background is pretty cluttered, so the fuzzy select can't tell the difference between foreground and background.
The Free Select tools allows you to draw an area to select by outlining it with the mouse. You can click point-by-point to capture straight lights or click and hold the mouse button, and free-hand it. Since your piece has lots off straight edges, click point by point at corners to select the edges. Gimp draws a straight line showing what it will select. The select tool leaves little cirlces that you can move, but once you click on the first circle, you complete the select.
You can also add to and subtract from selections. Use a select tool and press Ctrl and Alt for add to or subtract from the selection. Use this to clean up mistakes and handle complex shapes.
You can Feather your selection, so what ever you do, even dumping Black out of the paint can, blends at the selection edge. I chose Feather... from the Selection Menu. I used the Pencil tool.
The Fuzzy Select is really good for picking out the area around the figure in the middle. There is a “threshhold” value to says how similar the pixels have to be to include. Since the guy's bald head is pretty close in color, the threshold has to be very low (11 out of 255.) I then upped the threshhold to ~30 and with the shift-key held down, selected the space to the left of the figure and below the sword. This was pretty fiddy, so maybe the free-hand select would have worked better. I did all this a 400% zoom to really see what I was doing.
I then did a Select... Grow by three pixels to expand the area of selection and a Select Feather by 5 pixels to soften the edges. Next I used the pincil tool with a wide, circular brush (Shape you're drawing with) to fill it all in.
View attachment 27368
But if you have to edit things with Gimp, here are a few steps. I am by no means a Gimp/photo shop expert.
First, I grabbed you image from photobucket and cropped it to just top view.
High level, you need to use a select tool to grab only the portion of the image you want to change. Select it, grow your selection a little, and feather (soft the edges) of the selection, and then fill it.
There are a few tools for this. The easiest, if there is enough contrast, is the Fuzzy Select (Magic Wand icon). It selects portions of your image that are similar in color to where you've clicked. This works great if the contrast between the foreground and background is high. However, your background is pretty cluttered, so the fuzzy select can't tell the difference between foreground and background.
The Free Select tools allows you to draw an area to select by outlining it with the mouse. You can click point-by-point to capture straight lights or click and hold the mouse button, and free-hand it. Since your piece has lots off straight edges, click point by point at corners to select the edges. Gimp draws a straight line showing what it will select. The select tool leaves little cirlces that you can move, but once you click on the first circle, you complete the select.
You can also add to and subtract from selections. Use a select tool and press Ctrl and Alt for add to or subtract from the selection. Use this to clean up mistakes and handle complex shapes.
You can Feather your selection, so what ever you do, even dumping Black out of the paint can, blends at the selection edge. I chose Feather... from the Selection Menu. I used the Pencil tool.
The Fuzzy Select is really good for picking out the area around the figure in the middle. There is a “threshhold” value to says how similar the pixels have to be to include. Since the guy's bald head is pretty close in color, the threshold has to be very low (11 out of 255.) I then upped the threshhold to ~30 and with the shift-key held down, selected the space to the left of the figure and below the sword. This was pretty fiddy, so maybe the free-hand select would have worked better. I did all this a 400% zoom to really see what I was doing.
I then did a Select... Grow by three pixels to expand the area of selection and a Select Feather by 5 pixels to soften the edges. Next I used the pincil tool with a wide, circular brush (Shape you're drawing with) to fill it all in.
View attachment 27368
