How To??

[Teherean]

Hey people!

I have a few questions. I have some moc's on the forum, but there was someone complaining about the image size. Do you know a program that can rapidly resize my images to a smaller size (like 600x800)? This might save me boring afternoons in photoshop.

Second, How do you make those nice-looking egaly white backgrounds? because I build black, therefore the background whiteness is very important. Because if the background is dark, you won´t catch so many details. (maybe show me a site with a tutorial)?

Third and last question: What do you think is an important factor for landscaping, then I mean, colour, shape, size etc.

UPDATE:
I will add another question. I have recently created a flickr account and will be uploading to there soon. I have also started to comment on some moc's. My question is: how do you comment with the boxes around something in the picture?

Thank you

Marijn aka Teherean.

[DNL]

1: Here's a free image resize program: http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer
Be carefull, if you chose to copy the photo's you want to resize, the copied and resized pictures will have "[]" in their name, Brickshelf doesn't upload photo's that have [ and ] in their name, so you will have to copy them yourselve befor you use the program or remove the [ and ] from the names later if you want to upload the pics to brickshelf.

2: You can make a white background with a big piece of paper or a blanket. I'm not very good at making white backgrounds, so i think others can explain it better.

3: I depends on the kind of landscape you are building. I usually use several different colors to make it look more natural. Shape also depends on the kind of landscape.

[dutch]Ik ben een artikel over landschappen aan het schijven, als je het wil lezen kan ik (what) ik tot nu toe heb geschreven naar je toe sturen[/dutch)

[SavaTheAggie]

To answer your first question, if you have photoshop you can automate the process of resizing, rotating, or whatever you want to do to a large batch of photos. I don't have photoshop on the machine I'm currently posting from so I can't tell you exactly how to go about doing it.

However I can tell you that you'll first need to open a raw photo and in the history window click on the actions tab, click the new button and press "record". Photoshop will "record" every action you take on your photo, so do to your photo what you want. This is especially nice if you want to create thumbnails of a huge number of photos. If you want to simply resize all your photos, then resize your single image as normal and then press the "stop" button.

Then under the file tab at the top of the photoshop window, scroll down to "automate", choose which action you wish to perform to the whole batch, the source of your batch (all the files opened in photoshop, or all the files in a particular folder, etc.), the destination for your batch (save and close, or a particular folder, etc.), and the naming convention for each file. Be sure to use the option of giving each file a unique number in the file name - there's a name for it in photoshop but as I said - don't have it for reference here).

Then just go from there. Photoshop will do all the work for you, and the next time you want to resize photos, the action will already be there ready for you to use.

--Tony

[Bruce N H]

Hey,

First up, I'm going to shift this over to "publishing", which deals with these sorts of topics.

On your first question, you may find some things in this thread on Gimp (shareware equivalent of Photoshop), resizing programs, and image hosting and linking in the forum. If you get a free Flickr account, for instance, the site automatically creates images at a few different sizes from what you upload. So that might be your best bet and kill two birds (resizing and posting images) with one stone.

On the second, this thread and this one have some thoughts.

As to the third, I think the key is to break up straight lines. If you are building up the ground with green plates, for instance, I always try to make sure that there aren't just long unbroken straight edges. For instance, in this picture, you can see that I tried to make very irregular patterns in the ground. This becomes even more crucial when building up a hill, as long flat stretches look like a wall. Or if you are using BURPs, I try to disguise them so you don't get that repeating pattern. Here is an early MOC by me that was very unsuccessful in doing this. This was, IMO, more successful. More recently I've gone to doing cliffy areas all in one color. While I think a mixing of different grays is more realistic, it becomes kind of "busy" to photograph against.

Bruce

[CastleLord]

Btw Bruce N H is this Moc ment to be Helmsdeep from LOTR?

CastleLord.

[Bruce N H]

Btw Bruce N H is this Moc ment to be Helmsdeep from LOTR?

CastleLord.

Yes. Go here for my rendition of the Battle of Helms Deep.

Bruce

[fenris]

if you need a white background best way is to take phtos in your bathtube. sonds ridicolous - but great effect....

[JoshWedin]

if you need a white background best way is to take phtos in your bathtube. sonds ridicolous - but great effect....

That is a great idea! (Josh wanders off wondering why he never thought of that....)

Josh

[Bruce N H]

My wife is going to be impressed at how diligently I clean the bathtub now!

Bruce

[fenris]

great... happy that you like the idea...

[Athos]

Well as long as your fully dressed when you do it... Or if your not, don't tell us about it...

Steve