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Adrian Drake writes:
> That's a neat resource. It doesn't seem to have much in the
> way of photographing extreme closeups, though, which is a big
> thing with Lego. Plenty of the correct amount of light is the
> key for me when taking pictures. I could focus all the
> incandescent bulbs in the frame I wanted and it would always
> come out yellow. After moving to my new digs, with their
> bright flourescents, life is good.
I've found that if good light sources are not available, you can still
get a great picture if your camera has some manual settings. An
aperture of f5 to f8 or so will keep the entire model in focus while
still blurring the background. With a moderately narrow aperature like
that, you will need a long shutter time. I often use a shutter speed of
1/2 - 2 seconds. A tripod is of course essential for those long
exposures. Remember that the picture on the LCD is probably brighter
than it will look on your monitor, but be careful not to wash out the
image. It helps to take 2 or 3 shots at each angle to make sure you can
pick out a good one.
Some of the yellowness of incandescently lit photos can be
eliminated by using the white balance feature on your camera. However,
that almost never eliminates all the yellow. Photoshop 7 has a very
useful tool called "Auto Color" which works wonders in eliminating poor
color balance. For earlier versions or other programs, you'll need to
manually adjust the color balance by shifting the yellow/blue bar
further to the blue (about 5-15 percent, in my experience). When using
Photoshop, make sure you do all highlights, shadows, and midtones. A
great way to see to what extent the colors are off is to use an
eyedropper tool on a portion of your white background and then see what
RGB values come up. They should all be the same if the background is
truly white. If blue is a little low, or green a little high, you can
use Color Balance to fix it.
Also, if your image still isn't bright enough, the best way to
brighten it while keeping the darks dark and the lights light is to move
the middle triangle in Levels in Photoshop. This is equivalent to the
Gamma control in Corel Photopaint.
After you've cropped, brightened, color balanced, and resampled your
image, you can sharpen it a little to bring out the details. I find the
Unsharp Mask does the trick pretty well. It's usually best to avoid
sharpening over 80%. If you have a really blurry picture, try
increasing the Radius before you increase the Amount.
If you have a bunch of pictures that were taken with similar
settings, you can record your actions while adjusting one photo. Then
batch run those actions on all the other shots. The results will
usually be quite good.
I hope that helps!
> Like Ryan mentioned, a good white background is essential.
> I'm actually using a couple of Bionicle posters as my
> background right now for smaller shots. I believe that Jon
> Palmer uses a large movie poster for his backgrounds. Those
> work well because they're just a touch glossy and are of a
> heavy enough material to not crease easily.
Darn, I should have kept that Bionicle poster I got at
NWBrickCon...that's a great use for it!
--Bram
Bram Lambrecht
bram@cwru.edu
www.bldesign.org
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