Getting the Most Out of Your Digital Miniatures Photos

Introduction
I am far from a professional photographer. I'm not even a good or talented amateur photographer. However, I have learned a few tricks on how to photograph my miniatures that you might find helpful. On this page I'll take you through some of the techniques I used to create the photos seen elsewhere on this site.

Equipment & Software
I started out using a Kodak 260 digital camera about four years ago, and just recently switched to a newer Canon Digital Rebel. The Kodak camera was a 1-megapixel camera while the Canon is a 6-megapixel camera. For shooting photos you plan to post on the web, that doesn't make too much difference, except that you can crop a much smaller section of a photo taken with a higher resolution camera and still have it be clear at display resolutions of 72-96 dpi.
There is more information on the Internet about digital cameras than one person can read in a lifetime, and most of it comes from people who know far more about the subject than I do, so I won't attempt to add to it.
As far as software, I use CorelPHOTO-Paint for no other reason than I got it cheap through my employer and after using it for several years I am comfortable with it. If you have a digital camera you probably already have a freebie application that came with it, and chances are is does just about everything that you'll ever need to do.

Digital Enhancement
First of all, let me state that my objectives in editing my miniatures photographs is to present the miniatures in a setting that best shows off my miniatures, not my digital photo editing skills. Therefore, I rarely edit the miniatures themselves, only the terrain and other surroundings. There are exceptions. For example, if I have a great photo of a mini and then discover that there was a speck of dust or debris on the miniatures that really marrs an otherwise great shot, I am not averse to cloning out the debris. I believe this is justified since I am not really changing the appearance of the miniature, I am removing an extraneous bit that just happened to have gotten between the camera and the mini. I will also occassionally resort to tricks that really add to a photo, like blurring the rotor blades in the photo of an helicopter. About as far as I have ever gone is to edit a photo to closely approximate some painting I did later, after the photo was taken, simply because I was too lazy to retake the shot. Okay, I admit that is going too far, but now at least you know my philosphy regarding retouching photos.
I start with basic "raw" photographs. I really should spend more time taking each shot, composing it, using a higher f-stop and better lighting and all of that for depth of field etc., but sometimes that is too much work and takes to long. The photo I will start out with in this page was taken in the middle of a game, so there was no time to carefully light the board and position the camera. I just pointed the camera and took the shot. As a result, there is some work to be done (later, sitting down!) before the photo is worthy of the website. Now, on to the process.

Photo 1. This is the raw shot. All I did to it before posting it as you see it here is reduce the size of the image from the original that measured over 28 by 42 inches at 72 dpi (a 19MB file). The image you see here is 7 inches wide and is at 96 dpi resolution. There are some major problems with this photo, like the wallpaper visible in the upper left hand corner, and the fact that a good portion of the foreground is out of focus. Still, parts are salvagable.

Photo2. To give you some idea of the resolution of the Canon Digital Rebel, here is a small portion of the original photo. In Photo 1 you can see the flag to the left of the center of the photo. Here it is in its original resolution. Pretty cool, huh? That's what I really like about the Digital Rebel. Even if most of a shot is bad, there is likely to be part of it I can use.

Photo 3. Here I've marked with a red square the area I plan to use from the original photo. The red square is just to illustrate where I will crop the photo -- I don't normally do this step.

Photo 4. Here is photo after cropping and resizing to 7 inches wide. It isn't bad at this point, but it is a little dark. I'll use the Auto Equalize function in CorelPHOTO-Paint to brighten it up.

Photo 5. There. Not bad at all. But there are some "artifacts" visible. By artifact, I mean things like the light blue line running toward the upper left corner of the photo. That is the break between two sections of the board we played the game upon. Also, note the dark shadow where the hills, trees, and infantry stands meet the board, the tall wooden base of the tall pine tree on the left, and the sharp line between the edge of the "plowed field" and the rest of the board in the upper left. All these can be digitally corrected. I use the Clone Brush function to do that. Cloning copies a part of your photograph (the source) to another (the target). Both the size, shape, and transparency of the source and target can be controlled. I like to use a "fuzzy" brush to avoid hard edges when I clone. This works especially well for "natural" subjects like trees, grass, water, rocks, etc. that are kind of "fuzzy" to begin with.

Photo 6. Here is the photo after cloning out most artifacts but it there are still a few things wrong with it. Since I used a flash, the background is darker than the foreground. I used the Freehand Mask tool and drew a Mask right below the road encompassing the upper left half of the photo and cranked up the Brightness. The foreground is a little too out of focus, and there isn't much too much can be done about that. I tried using the Sharpen feature of CorelPHOTO-Paint, but there is really no way to restore missing information in a blurred photo. And, I see a few more artifacts, like the lines between the small hillocks just to the right of and above the bridge.

Photo 7. Here is the finished photo ready for posting on the website.There are still a few things wrong with it, like the fact that you can still see the green, grass-flocked bases of the miniatures that are on the dirt road. It looks a bit like the soldiers each brought a yard of AstroTurf to stand on. I could spend 10 minutes or so cloning that out, but I don't want to.

Photo 8. Finally, you can play with the other "artistic" features in your digital photo application to create effects like this "vignette." To make this, I changed the mode to Grayscale, cranked up the Contrast, and added the "frame" with the Vignette function in CorelPHOTO-Paint. It's not a bad result, but not really what this page is about.

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