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Looks good! What is this extraction tool you speak of? I might know it by another name but it is drawing a blank at the moment.

I would also like to suggest using the motion blur at an angle for better looking snow. It makes static snow look like it is moving.

Sha1emade wrote:

Very Very nice mate

Thanks for sharing and adding to the Dakka!

Very helpful tutorial.

oni wrote:Excellent job Coldsnap and a very nice tutorial. I do have one question tho. Why not use the extraction tool to remove the unwanted background? It's 1000x less hassle.

[edit]
@ Sha1emade - Here's one that I did quickly.

Would you mind explaining the extraction tool? I've always found erasing the background the most tedious/painful part of shopping mini photos...would love to hear some tips.

Ryan

legoburner wrote:Finally pushed to front page.

Woot!

Tek wrote:
Double-click the background layer. This converts the background to a functional layer.

Duh! Didn't think of that

Personally I would also not use the delete function here. Use a layer mask (layers>layer mask>reveal all). This way you can paint back in any possible mistakes you make in the deletion process.

So true, not using masks is just a bad habit from back when I used a low-end system, they were a bit harsh on memory back then

Quite frankly I'm overwhelmed by the amount of positive feedback I've gotten after posting these images, and it's awesome to see that the short tutorial I wrote has been an inspiration to others!
I want to (again) point out that without the great paintjobs made by my friends and the local gw staff, none of those photos would have been taken. A photo is never better than the mini in it

@ Sha1emade and AgeOfEgos

I just made a post on using the Extraction Tool...

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/235866.page

jackinthetank wrote:Those are as fantastic as Willy Wonka's 3 course meal bubble gum!

Does that include the part at the end where you blow up and turn blue?

Really impressed with the quality you achieved, so much that I had to have a go! Nothing up to your standards but here are my first attempts

Will we be expecting more of these in the nigh future?

General Mayhem- Looks good for a first effort. The general idea is not very hard. The tweaking takes some time. I ended up adding 8 pics to the one I made. I like your use of smoke. I would probally make it a bit more transparent so we cad see the guys a bit better. I shot a pic with that very piece of terrain. I have yet to edit it but it makes for a cool piece.

Panzer Smurf- I was hoping people would just post them here. I think we will see more from cold snap as well.

Does photoshop 7 have the tools to make these kinds of pictures happen?

Yup. Most are pretty basic photoshop tools. Other tools can be faked with other tools if you dont have the most up to date software.

Thanks for the feedback Sha1emade, I will have another go as you suggest. The "smoke" is actually a wispy cloud used as an overlay, hides the obvious fact that they are models! I had a thought about backdrops, what about some painted backdrops specific to the 40K universe photographed and saved as high resolution TIFFS for people to use? My biggest problem is finding the right image for the baxckground so maybe I will have a go at painting some. My Gaming table at home has quite a large painted backdrop:

You might try smoke against a black background. Then use screen instead of overlay for the smoke layer. You can adjust the levels, brightness and contrast of the layer and you should get it to look better and still more visible. After that you can make a duplicate layer and try some of the blending options. For the duplicate layer try soft light. It makes a cool effect for smoke when over the first smoke layer. You can also invert the second selection as well. If your smoke is getting to dark. That will lighten it up. Possibly too much but it depends on the picture. Have fun and post the results. Also you might need to erase around the smoke when done if using screen or any inverted pictures. I make a duplicate layer and the use guazzian blur at about 9.0. To soften the edges of the edit. This works best when using an inverted layer above a normal layer. Hope that helps...I'm almost confused reading it so.....good luck...Sorry its late. I also really liked your pic. I just wanted to see more and the smoke was in the way.


Also for back ground pics. I like long expanses of broken up snow. google iceberg, tundra, glacier and devastated buildings. There are some great backgound pics there. Plus many more that I can't think of.

Cheers for all that, will have a go today. Just been down to my "shed" for another photoshoot using the whole 6 x 4 gamingboard and my existing backdrop. I need to do some others butthe one I have is ok for fantasuy as well as 40K. Good tips for googling backdrops, somtimes it's difficult to think what to put in for your search. Do you look for images same pixel size as your originals?

I tend to only search for Extra large images. They tend to look better. Large images are ok but you usually still need to resize your photo so they are a bit closer. The camera I use shoots in pixel sizes generally larger then what appears on the net so I just try to find larger pics to play with.

editted out

Hi Somnicide, I am afraid those images are too unrelated to gaming to be kept in the gallery so I have to remove them. You can upload them as attachments to this thread if you want (and please do as the jet contrails would work very nicely), but in the gallery - a place for wargaming related images, the link is too tentative.

Meh. I can't upload directly and I am not going to start a photo hosting thing somewhere else just for that.

I tried this, with no snow and no scenery. I tried to match the lighting on the Plague tower to the lighing in the background. I hope you like it! extra hard work was needed to get the background to show through the hose and bell tower. I Hope it produces the moody mood i was going for.

I'll be doing a silver tower next.

A nice site with lots of high res textures that are for free is http://zentextures.com/

They also have skies etc in case your lacking in your photo collection. No billowing smoke clouds though as far as I have seen

Wow! Very nice work!

Always nice to see another photographer here
I wish I would get to do that as well with miniatures but at my local store they don't have that extravagant scenery (GW Stockholm), at least not what I've seen in a long time, they used to have a nice city when cityfight was released though) and I don't have any scenery at all pretty much, nor does any of my friends play any WH games so Im stuck :(

You ever tried to make HDR and Bloom out of these kind of pics? could get pretty amazing I guess...

If you don't know how to in photoshop I'd be glad to tell you ;P

You ever tried to make HDR and Bloom out of these kind of pics? could get pretty amazing I guess...

Gave it a first try and ended up with these...

It's something about that flamer I love.

I'm glad you did do some HDR, mind if I borrow that flamer and toy with the pic? (I dont have any minis that vivid :( )

Trygon pic looks cool, but I think it'd look better with a "real" background instead of one that looks like a piece of linen.

Still looks cool, though.


Eric

Holy.... that is amazing. Realy well done and it looks professional. I especialy like the superheavies and that fex

MagickalMemories wrote:Trygon pic looks cool, but I think it'd look better with a "real" background instead of one that looks like a piece of linen.

It's actually my Carnifex, still saving up for a Trygon... I've built a ripper-style army, removing the legs on all the models
And yes, I think I went a little overboard with aging the photo

Müller wrote:
I'm glad you did do some HDR, mind if I borrow that flamer and toy with the pic? (I dont have any minis that vivid :( )

Go ahead... I borrowed it from a friend for the shoot