The quality of the photos however, was not really my issue so to speak.
Now I'll try to keep this brief but it might drag on a little...
I often browse coolminiornot and am amazed at some of the paint jobs out there, whilst there are a very small amount of people with insane eyesight most of us have 20/20 vision thereabouts. It was boggling my mind how many "pro painters" were managing to produce works of art that on close inspection seem to have no brush marks.
Whenever i photographed my minis with top line equipment, they were showing up paint errors i could not see with my naked eye. (I have confirmed 20/20 vision myself without glasses)
Now - i am not saying i am the best painter in the world, not by a long shot. But something seemed amiss here.
More google searches using my Sherlockian senses. Mostly "photoshop miniatures" - "people cheating on cmornor" etc etc.
I did find a few discussions about people photoshopping images, and suspect images but nothing concerete leapt out at me.
I considered the logic of it all -
Painter A paints a mini to a good standard in the flesh, he cannot see any faults without magnification and is happy with his mini.
He photographs it and notices on magnification there are some striking brush marks etc.
Here is an example of a raw image you can zoom in on and see my bad work lol.
He then photoshops the raw image to remove the bad parts.
The example below is just done in paint, briefly to give an idea of what could be possible with A - some skill with photo editing and B - some patience and time!
Back to the imaginary scenario! - Painter A has now photoshopped his image and the magnified figure now looks awesome in pictures and can get those super high scores on CMON etc!!
If that painter then wants to sell his work, he is in a good position to! - When the customer recieves the mini he is over the moon as - we remember, the mini looks ace in the flesh to someone with 20/20 vision!- everyone is happy! the only way the customer would ever know the deceit would be if he photographed the mini himself in high res and zoomed in!
Now the final part of the jigsaw! - i had been photographing my miniatures wrongly from the start!
Hopefully if you've read this far then maybe this last bit will be helpful!
I have access to a top line Nikon camera with a white background and professional lighting. Producing good photographs "should" not have been a problem. I was getting in close with macro and grabbing those awesome macro shots. Herein lies the problem. DO NOT ZOOM IN!
All of my issues, leading to my conspiracy theories and investigations into photoshop etc had been amplified by my own photos!
The camera sees way more than the eye..
These last few photos are taken from a much further distance, on a similar high setting. This produces a raw image like the one below.
This image is now cropped using paint - i guess better programs are available!
.JPG)
Taking all this info into account i conclude that with the usage of all these tools, there are "some" painters out there that are photoshopping pics to produce even better images. If i was to tidy up Felix face a little on the raw image before cropping lets see what he might look like..
Here is the raw image with some sharpening around the eyes -
Finally here is the cropped version of the manipulated photo.
Gotrek and Felix - done!
Finally one last manipulated image - i have made Felix have blue eyes. I am now 100% convinced that some of the more miraculous paint jobs i have seen are edited using Professional paint packages, i am a complete novice at photo editing and this was done in standard windows paint in 3 minutes..
I hope this helps some people out as my mind was frazzled by sussing all this out!
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