Grim Dark Kitchen: November 2014

After an extended pause in painting due to the launch of Bungie's Destiny, I'm slowly creeping back into the saddle! I finally broke open a commercial tabletop photo light box that I ordered from tanga.com earlier in the year, and I think it was worth it's very reasonable sale price of $27.99! This is not a product review (and I'm certainly not qualified to be reviewing light boxes), but I will say that I was impressed by the materials included (pictured below) and by how easy this was to use. The bag folds out into the light box, by the way, which is super cool. Results are comparable to my previous setup, so far, but I do feel like these new tools will provide a greater potential for improvement.

For starters, here's a look at my setup:

Miniatures are still a good deal smaller than what this is built to accommodate, so I've elevated the platform with some foam, and I've also added a desk light with a white/blue color hue to balance out the yellowish bulbs in the side lights. I don't know if that was a good idea or not, but I wanted to simulate what I think real photographers do, which is to dim ambient light and stick to the sources you can control directly. An additional note, I'm using my Galaxy Note 3 for photos still, so the quality is fine, but not great, nor do I have any skill at this whatsoever. Lastly, I used that magnifying claw stand to hold my phone in place, in order to normalize the photo angles, etc.

Here's a shot of the setup as it was during actual pictures:

In addition to the light box, I wanted to play around with some more dynamic background options. Thankfully, I know Dave from Thirteenth Company Painting, and he suggested some spot backdrops and the classic blue-white GW fade. I've printed them out on a nice color printer and you'll see below that the they work well as part of the original image as well as when digitally inserted.

Here are a few shots from my first attempt with this light box, with notes about any digital treatments done:

Basic scouts straight out of the light box. You can see that the cloth backdrop's creases have not quite fallen out yet.

The printed back drops were even cooler than I expected, and very easy to use. I slightly adjusted brightness and contrast in some of these. In particular, the Belial conversion at the bottom is a tricky subject because there are a lot of shadowy recesses next to bright and shining gold armor.

Lastly, I removed the white background from a few images and digitally inserted the Games Workshop blue-to-white gradient background. Notably, I have not feathered these layers. Any minimal changes were to brightness or contrast. (before and afters)