People often ask me about my photography setup. I've improved a lot over the years and managed to get something that enables me to quickly snap pictures of my miniatures with minimal set-up and set down simply using my iPhone 13 pro.
A lot of what I implemented is covered in greater detail on Warhammer Community's photography tips and if you want to do the special blue background, you just need to learn how to get rid of the BG using one of many available GIMP online tutorials.
Having said that, here's my process:
- Setup the photography area, it consists of two warm lamps and a big fill lamp and I just trust the phone's white balance post-processing to fix lightning – I know, I'm a barbarian – I also usually wait to take pictures in an overcast day in the afternoon, as my room is sunny and the sun will fill it with light.
- Snap the pictures from as much a fixed position as I can, not too close to the model (you can crop later)
- Open my camera photo app or google photo's editor and increase the brightness, decrease contrast, just slightly.
- I finally run my stuff trough GIMP/Photoshop and add a gradient background, as well as compose pics of big units together when I have time.
The most important: Light
Light is the food of good pictures, and you don't want any strong shadows but soft ones. The best way to get this is to flood the thing with light. Just pay attention that your background is not too reflexive as it can darken your picture. If you have a strong ceiling light you can also put a white sheet of paper just in front of your miniature to reflect it from under and fill it with bounced-off light.
Here's my setup with the aforementioned 3 lights:
Pictures and processing
Here is the raw image straight out of the phone
From there I increase Brightness and decrease contrast, I have a long winded version of why, but the results are great for 99% of cases. The interface below is from Google Photo's app, but any phone image app these days have the same functions. Just don't overdo it, especially for bright miniatures.
Then just crop it, I like to make the bulk of the mini take the center frame of a third vertically and horizontally.
Here is the final cropped result
And even without the fancy Background, as long as you have proper lighting and do some minor post processing, you should be able to get great pictures.
These scouts, for example, are dark armored and small, but still came out great for the quick paintjob it was, and all it took was to put some cardboard behind them!
Lightning really helps, even with no dedicated Background
Grab some chipboard for a quick, even background
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