A not-eavy-Metal for Oldhammer painters

ardyer

Member
Great issue to raise. I'm using Photoshop. I don't know how accessible this makes it across the board. I could always share the source building blocks and workflow insight and people can try to reconstruct it in software that suits them? Everyone interested in eventually getting down and dirty with this, let us know what you would (or would rather not) use.

I have Photoshop so it's perfectly accessible to me. Screw the rest of those guys, lol ;)
 

Badaab

Member
Fun stuff!
I need to get some photos of my Oldhammer stuff up, and maybe it'll motivate me to paint this haul of lead Skaven I got last year... or the Necromunda horde, or the Space Marines...
As far as the resources are concerned, a series of PhotoShop layer templates might work best? You can always stick it on top of your source image(s) or whatever.
 

Zhu Bajie

Member
Gallivantes":1qm5rg5f said:
In essence it's quite hard to define what the "right" level of brightness really is when it depends on both monitor calibration and environmental lighting. In any test case it varies for every person out there.

Lol! Yes, there is an entire art and science of colour matching and reproduction - have look at Kodak colour matching strips or Pantone Capsure, and other colour management workflows that account for the variable conditions. I'm not suggesting we go to those lengths! We're not creating forgeries or art prints :) I find to eyeball print the best method is to use indirect daylight, such as by a wide open window, on a white background, putting prints side by side.

Glad you found the comments on the grid stuff useful, again what you've done looks great. Got a baseline grid worked out most things will fall into place quite naturally. Then can see something like the Dragons in White Dwarf 85 and they've just chucked the whole thing out and gone bonkers. Wish I had more time to play with it myself!

Good spot on making sure the photographs have enough background - I'm not a photographer, but I think that being far enough back and allowing for background space, then cropping the image prevents distortion and gives room to play. A whole different discussion? Or maybe that's part of capturing the 80s look.
 

Fimm McCool

Member
Zhu Bajie":kretg86q said:
I'm not a photographer, but I think that being far enough back and allowing for background space, then cropping the image prevents distortion and gives room to play. A whole different discussion? Or maybe that's part of capturing the 80s look.

There's also the issue of focal lengths. Depending on your lens you may need to be quite a long way from the model before the depth of field is wide enough to get all the model in focus.
 

Badaab

Member
Fimm McCool":2prkk93h said:
Zhu Bajie":2prkk93h said:
I'm not a photographer, but I think that being far enough back and allowing for background space, then cropping the image prevents distortion and gives room to play. A whole different discussion? Or maybe that's part of capturing the 80s look.

There's also the issue of focal lengths. Depending on your lens you may need to be quite a long way from the model before the depth of field is wide enough to get all the model in focus.

This is absolutely correct. Some folks try to get as close as possible to the miniature and take photos that way, which can lead to the subject being out of focus without the correct focal length on your lens. If you don't have a macro lens, I wouldn't suggest it with the modern digital cameras (or even a phone camera). The best things you can do when shooting pics of your minis are: good lighting, setting the white balance in your camera to match said lighting, and having a tripod setup with a timer for the shutter. A light diffusion setup can also be incredibly handy (you can make these fairly simply, or buy a specialized box- I think mine was less than $20 US).
Something to remember about the miniature shots from the 1980-90s- they were done with traditional silver emulsion film SLR cameras, and then you have the limitations of the printing process of the period as well, so images will have some distortion or fuzziness (now its all artifacting/aliasing on the image). If you want to achieve that look on the photos, I'd suggest a light Gaussian Blur filter in Photoshop, followed by an increase in contrast and setting the black levels slightly higher than normal.
 

Gallivantes

Member
Update :)

I've done another pass on the background, pulling out some sample pages to study. There's some proper colour variation now as opposed to the previous monochromatic marble.

It's brighter this time around, adding some nice contrast to the logo. The whole issue of exposing tweak controls for brightness and colour is in the works, I'll get back to reporting on that later.



Zhu Bajie":18lclahs said:
Got a baseline grid worked out most things will fall into place quite naturally. Then can see something like the Dragons in White Dwarf 85 and they've just chucked the whole thing out and gone bonkers.
I've got you buddy! I went back to the drawing board with this bit and devised a different workflow. I found it to be a much more robust and time efficient way to place images, position margins, keep alignments, retain even margin widths etc. The WD 85 dragon example would be fine for me and I think the workflow is pretty straightforward once explained. I'll go through in detail how that part works later on once it's time to explain the inner workings of the template file setup.


Zhu/Fimm/Badaab: Good input on the photo techniques there. I think some formality to the photo process would be nice because it will make each single page look nicely consistent. In the wider sense it'll also work better as a series, putting pages from multiple authors back to back, side by side. Minimizing perspective distortion, getting adequate focus, makes sense to me. My own 2 cents on the photo process would be: consider the top-down angle. When I put my test page together this stood out to me in the photos I used whenever consistency wasn't there.
 

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Fimm McCool

Member
Gallivantes":15kqitof said:
Zhu/Fimm/Badaab: Good input on the photo techniques there. I think some formality to the photo process would be nice because it will make each single page look nicely consistent. In the wider sense it'll also work better as a series, putting pages from multiple authors back to back, side by side. Minimizing perspective distortion, getting adequate focus, makes sense to me. My own 2 cents on the photo process would be: consider the top-down angle. When I put my test page together this stood out to me in the photos I used whenever consistency wasn't there.

It's also a handy opportunity to pick up some photography tips! :)
 

Mister Rab

Member
This is great stuff from start to finish; oodles of creativity that oozes with the smell, taste, and feel of the 80s. Count me in!
 

Gallivantes

Member
Hello,

I am hoping to wrap this up and share before too long so the issue of exactly how to propagate the file cropped up in my mind.

I'm not in the habit of external file sharing so I thought I'd ask around. Does anyone have any recommendations for a way to make this publically accessible? Right now the file is around 50Mb compressed.
 

Zhu Bajie

Member
http://www.box.com
I use for sharing large files. It's got a lot of functionality like version control and commentary, but also works as a simple upload/download file. You can just publish a sharing link to the file. I find it the simplest and most straightforward to use.

http://www.dropbox.com
Used this one too, but found the app a bit too intrusive and annoying.

https://www.google.com/drive/
Google Drive also has a filesharing facility. Don't like the UI personally.

They're all free up to a certain user / filesize limit, 50MB is no problem.
 
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