Hikari Photo Studio Upgrade Part 2
Thank you for those who has taken the time to provide some valuable feedback to me regarding the Hikari Photo Studio upgrade, special thanks to figure.fm comrades Otaku Dan, Rochefort Schubaltz, Tequila and Koshiko for providing valuable opinions for me to improve my Hikari Photo Studio. I spent the better part of today making various adjustments based on those feedback and I’m back to report the progress I have made so far! For comparison sake, most of these shots feature my lovely daughters in nearly identical pose throughout (it’s difficult to get them back into the same pose if I were to move them just for the sake of moving them around >.>;;;). Though I did try to spice things up here and there! Anyway, enough of talking, let’s get to the shots!
So I started off with the Day white fluorescent since it has the 79% lead from the survey yesterday.
While it may be slightly better than the auto white balance, but the tint of amber/yellow is bothering me somewhat so I know I have to do something to get rid of that yellow tint....
So I went into Camera Control Pro to try to tweak some settings.
There are many types of white balances to choose from, fluorescent alone have many types, Day white fluorescent, Daylight fluorescent, Cool-white fluorescent, even sodium and mercury types are also available... after taking a few more shots with various standard type fluorescent settings, I decided to go with Cool-white fluorescent fine tuned to A6, G1. And here is the result:
Edit: After reading a few responses, I decided to throw in another tweak (I have a very weak sense in color, very little preconception of what a color needed to look like until I see a comparison.)
Cool-white fluorescent A6 M1 with D-Light on Normal
After I took some lunch break, I noticed there was a box of unusual looking cake in the kitchen….
It’s the snowy mooncakes that I heard so much about! I wasted little time and grabbed them for my daughters >.>;
Daughters are very careful with the sweet stuff so they only picked one bag for themselves!
Strawberry princess sounds good yea?
So after we had some cake I noticed a few other figures/plushes wanted to get in on the photo shoot…
Dilbert! You not suppose to get lucky with my daughters!
Dogbert make his appearances! Perhaps he will take part in the Dollfie Dream Theater after all!
Kagami wanted to mimic her bigger sisters and gave us a panchira shot of her own… perhaps someday she would be as lovely as my other dollfie daughters.
Revoltech Rin, Mini Revoltech Auska and Escalayer all came out to join the fun!
And after figure.fm member Koshiko pointed out that the background may be too busy and distracting, so I decided to give a few additional backgrounds a spin and see how it turn out. It can’t be a Hikari Photo Studio if it can’t henshin right?
I know I still have room to improve my indoor photos, please feel free to leave any comments and suggestions :)
Like the upgrades to the Hikari photo studio.. Maybe its my monitor.. maybe its my eyes.. but the cool white seems to lighten their skin tones.. past what I would consider normal. Not photo related.. but potentially useful knowledge. All Colours are best represented in Natural light. Best source of natural light is of course the sun. Since the Sun.. Isn't indoors with you.. Ya have to fool the eye.. Flourescents lamps are great for Illumination.. but dreadful for actual painting with.. Since they tend to be blue.. Even Daylight bulbs that are meant to mimic the sun.. are still slighty blue in my opinion. How I conquered this for my painting of Garage kits.. is I use two different types of light sources to try and replicate as close as possible natural light.. I've got several Flourescent lamps which being slightly blue in nature.. then I add red from several Incadescent bulbs.. these tend to blend at the distances of where I'm painting into fairly decent white light..
Just my two cents... Hope it helps ya Wolf.
Thanks for the input, I have noticed the slight blue/green tint in my previous photo as well so in the color correction chart I tried to tune it back to the red/amber side. These fluorescent bulbs are about $20 a piece so I didn't expect to be able to reproduce the sun here XDDD. I chose the cool white because the description of the bulb might have suggested it is a cool white type bulb. The first step for me is to achieve reasonable picture quality so I am hoping I am getting closer to that bit by bit.
Oooh its definately closer. Just thought I'd give you what I use for painting my Garage Kits.. which tends to get me a pretty natural skin tone.
For some reason I still feel that the other 2 white balance setting carry a bit too much magenta hue to them.
The first few photos remind of a post card. Those are some good quality pics.
Thank you, these are all WIP, I am hoping to improve them bit by bit.
The white and pink backgrounds look the best. Black makes them look like they are floating too much. Red looks like a disaster.
Good luck on your photography. I plan on getting the D5000 after a while also. ^ ^
D5k is a good cam, kinda wished I went for the D90 now lolz.
Why is that? Something wrong with the D5000?
The D5000 is alrighty too expensive for me. Can't possibly afford the D90. ^ ^;;;
Nothing wrong with D5k, it's just that flip down liveview isn't as useful as I had hoped, because that's the reason I didn't get D90.
Since you have a Gray Back ground, you'd might want to experiment with a Custom White Balance using the gray card as your measure. I found that it brought out the colors more. For quick shots, I've found that using Daylight (4000k) usually works great compared to other default white balance settings.
And them mooncakes look delicious...
Thanks for the input, working a patch right now, should be ready in a few minutes time!
Still clueless about the camera stuff ^^;; But I did vote for the background one. Definitely don't got for anything reflective XD
On another note, your picture of Dollfie and figma really gives me an idea of the actual scale between a Figma and a Dollfie. I need that scale proportion for later on. Thanks!
I thought the silver background looked kinda cool though!
Hehe those are revoltech though, not figma, but should be similar.
Kagami is a figma :) But you're right they should be similar... though strangely Kagami looks bigger than Asuka 0.o
Ahhhh I almost forgot I had Kagami in there lol. That's a mini Revoltech Asuka.
Oooooh! No wonder Asuka looks kinda small there ^^; Still a good scale representation and now I think I can safely continue the project for sure knowing these scale :D
I just wish people would stop asking me to go out and do stuff so I can finish my projects XD
Hurry up! I have got thing waiting on the wing. I don't proclaim to know a lot about photography either, I just want my daughters to look good in front of camera, that's all.
remember though, white glossy surface may create a nice white glow effect - http://www.exelica-meteor.com/2009/09/26/why-using-white-background-and-how-pics-and-tutorial-1/
For starter, I just want to achieve a good color result from my photos :D
Lovely photos!
How come you dont dress your girls in any of the clothes that you got for them?
Well I am practicing my indoor photography, it's easier to compare photo quality if they wear the same clothes. Once I am satisfied with my result, then I can move on to change their clothes! That's to avoid taking all different photo set just to find out that I suck in taking indoor photos.
LoL that's partly my fault since I'm working on my 4koma using his musume-tachi as the basis of the storyline ^^;; Will work on them ASAP!
That's only 33% of the reason, the other 33 was what I just told Danny, the last 33% has to do with some of the girls are under glad wrap and I didn't want to take it off!
Glad wrap... keeps them fresh ^_^
Fresh and tasty!
Your pictures have improved immediately, glad I could help :)
I like the pink and white version best.
Going to the larger F stop didn't really improve the sharpness of the pictures all that much, perhaps I am still in semi-long shutter region 1/15-1/20. Or perhaps that's the limitation of my optics, not too sure.
The simple colored backgrounds have the best effect on the overall photo color and how the skin tones look for white balance (save for the red one). And if you really can't get the white balance good in a shot, you can always shoot Raw and tweak later.
Well in most of these photos, I haven't noticed a huge effect on skin tone through the background; they all looked pretty similar to me. Well I am shooting RAW all the time now but I am just looking to find the optimized setup with all the new gear available. Nothing is going to replace the sun, but it's so cold outside that I don't think I will be going out again until next year. What I am doing right now, is to attempt to create a set of reference photo for me to use later on, since I lack the natural ability to determine what a color need to look like in a photo.
all these tweaks and settings are very confusing ^^; im a noob in this field but i like the shots that came out brighter. you should try shooting with a complete white(or any other color) backdrop, that will make it easier to focus on the subject.
Sorry about the confusion ^^; I am doing all these test shots and color balance exercise to prepare for the grand group photo which I am composing right now.
For coloured backgrounds, I can't decide between two! D=
The pink is quite nice but then the violet goes quite well with their eye colours. And also provides a bit of a contrast with their red/pink clothes too.
I kind of like the violet too!