real photos for story pics-RFC

[santi]

I wanted to create story pics for a campaign. Since I cannot draw and I want to make sure no copyrighted material creeps in, I took some pictures. I am submitting them here to ask for comments- does this look ok,
should I keep them or maybe this can be also assigned on the artist's already overloaded time schedule?

Anyway, here are the pics:
The first two are supposed to show a lake in a forest where undead attack.(shadows, shadows2)
The fire1 and fire3a are supposed to show the effects of orc attacks on the horizon.
snow is supposed to show a snowed forest(home of the north elves)
while hostmountains and the three Thoria pics are supposed to show menacing mountain ranges. I particularly like the menacing-looking clouds in Thoria3 and the distant snowed mountains in Thoria

[santi]

ok realized I can only add 3 at a time

[santi]

last set

[Sapient]

A couple of links you might find useful:

http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13990
http://forum.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?p=260591#p260591

[Sgt. Groovy]

Wow, you have some nice scenery over there.

One thing when working with digital photographs: Save them in JPG format. This is the format designed for photographs and it can compress them down to 15% compared to PNG.

The photos fire1, fore3a, shadows and shadows2 are just doo dark/noisy to be used. The rest might have some potential, but they need some postprocessing. Here are some suggestions:

• Snow: I removed the yellowish cast, increased contrast and removed what appeared to be modern buildings in the background.
• Hostmountains: I increased contrast to enhance the "menacing" effect
• Thoria: I made it less flat and more saturated.

If you want to use photos, you should learn the fundamentals of digital photo enhancement. Just the levels adjustements and clone tool will already get you quite far.

[Sgt. Groovy]

Another version of the "menacing clouds" where the mountains are not completely silhouetted:

[zookeeper]

Are you sure you want narrow stripes in your story screens instead of the image actually filling the screen vertically as well?

[Sgt. Groovy]

You want menacing? How about "The Fury of Hell Is About to Rain on Us!" menacing?

[santi]

Groovy, this is great!

Zookeeper, no, I prefer the full screen, but as you can imagine the photos were edited to get rid of things that are not too Wesnothian, like electric wires or cars.... Anyway, I have not really used gimp that much. I'm sure there is much more-looks like the people who posted have developed this into a full science.

[Sgt. Groovy]

the photos were edited to get rid of things that are not too Wesnothian, like electric wires or cars

For this you really should get around to learn to use the clone tool. With it, it's possible to remove unwanted details from the picture without cropping (I used it on the snow image to remove the building on the background).

[JAP]

Santi: Well the overpainting style i used on these pictures is slow (you my have to work a afternoon or so to get a picture right) but pretty easy.
I guarantee that you can do it, but you need pictures that is pretty god to start from.
Thoria and hostmountins might be usable if you want to work in that style, but not the rest.

[kitty]

a few things i consider important for story pics:

- composition. you have one given element when creating story art for wesnoth - the black text border thingie. and your composition should refelect that. your thoria piece suffers from that especially. the most visually interesting thing - the mountains, which divide the picture, provide an interesting sillhouette etc, are completly beneath it.

- something that bothers me heavily when clicking through wesmere's story pics are the different formats. because every single pic seems to have another size the "next" button keeps jumping around. for useabilitie's sake: resize them all to one size (the map's one perhaps)! also get rid of the upright formats, they look odd on a horizontal screen

- when reading through your comments i get the impression you aren't too happy with your source material. if that is the case - just get out and take new ones! that way you'll learn more about photography and will need less time in the end.

- have fun!



(and what does RFC stand for?)

[AI]

Request For Comments

[santi]

Ok, thanks for the comments. The reason interesting stuff was marginally shown in the pictures(like the mountains) was exactly that I was unhappy with what I thought were the only possibilities in gimp to remove non-Wesnothian things like electrical wires.