Which pic is better?

[Dammekkos2]

I\'ve never been good at taking pics, I think it is one of my major flaws on CMON. Partially due to laziness (havn\'t built light box or printed a decent backdrop etc etc).

Which style is better, natural light (all my gallery pics are like this)

Or artificial light? (looks a lot more colourful, but also very yellow and extremely shiny, which I hate).

 

[Albert Moreto Font]

in my opinion natural light is always better, i have always been very bad at taking pics as well but my last couple of postings are really great pics and were taken with natural light, on the balcony, between 12:00-15:00 pm when the light is good (here in barcelona we\'ve got light all the time anyway lol) and a well printed background... also if the miniatures are paintedin metallics, they won\'t shine as much as they will do if you put a lamp, which is nicer on the pics so you can see the tones and all... finally, what about a combination of both? i think nano does it this way

 

[Orb]

The yellow hue comes from the bulb, a tungsten one by the looks of it. This can be corrected by changing the white balance settings, or you could use a \"daylight\" bulb

 

[Ogrebane]

Im $#!te at taking photos myself but natural is always better. If the lighting is too bright you cant adjust it in a photo editor. Having said that if you want to take good pids then print out a backdrop and get some desk lamps. The yellow can be taken out by manually setting the light level on your camera. Btw nice paint job.

 

[supervike]

Cool mini. I think the 2nd photo lets me see the mini better, but the first is far superior in color and tone. If you could just brighten up the 1st a smidge...Turn the sun to \'high\'lol

 

[Dragonsreach]

Originally posted by supervike
Cool mini. I think the 2nd photo lets me see the mini better, but the first is far superior in color and tone. If you could just brighten up the 1st a smidge...Turn the sun to \'high\' lol

Give the poor lad a break, He\'s in Newcastle! The only sun we saw up there is that carp newspaper!

Personally I prefer the brighter of the two but the yellow cast is spoiling the excellent work. (Easily changed on a digital camera).
If you want to try some differing ways of taking photos by artificial light, have a look in the Articles for Honza\'s article on single light photography.
It\'s a great place to start.

 

[Legacy Account]

First one is far superior. Just needs a Levels tweak in Photoshop.

It\'s a bulky mini, and some of it is in shadow. You can use a sheet of white card or paper as a reflector to bounce light back into the recesses.

 

[Orb]

nice one Spacemunkie!

My problem with natural light is the inconsistency of results (especially in the UK, for example). With a lamp you\'re in control.

 

[DrEvilmonki]

Doh Spacemunkie beat me to it but here are my tweeks

 

[DrEvilmonki]

@spacemunkie
How do you do the blue/white background fade?

 

[EricJ]

the first one is better, I hate yellow lit minis!

And there are full spectrum bulbs, it\'s like natural light shoved into a lamp, the best of both worlds

 

[Trevor]

Well, I think this pretty clearly shows that its all about the picture.

@ Spacemunkie, how do you do that? Everytime I try to mess with photoshop it always ends up looking worse, even if I just play with the levels and nothing else.

 

[Einion]

I used the second picture as although it\'s highly coloured this is much easier to compensate for well in Photoshop than a very dark image (because these tend to show a lot of noise):

Excluding some cleanup on the edge of the mini due to the bumpy background here\'s what I did:
open;
Filter > Reduce Noise... current version of PS, very handy;
added a Levels adjustment layer, select the Set Grey Point eyedropper and click on the background... shhh, don\'t tell anyone, this can take a colour cast off in one click! ;
tweaked the Levels sliders to lighten the image, particularly the midtones;
Filter > Extract to remove the background;
(extra work here cleaning up edge);
flatten;
Image Size, change to 500 pixels wide;
Filter > Unsharp Mask, 200, .3, 5;
save.

Not counting the edge cleanup this took longer to describe than to do If you take your shots against a smooth background you can extract it much more easily and this whole process could take about 40 seconds on a fast machine.

Einion

 

[Dammekkos2]

ok thanks for the opinions and tips guys. I will be trying some photoshop magic on my next submissions for sure, it definately improves the pic quality without distorting the paint job.