In a (New) World of My Own

This is for those other natural-light shooters like myself: A series of presets to put some punch into your image, without adding an annoying colour-cast.

I’ve tried to take a few panoramas within Northrend…in World of Warcraft, but the going has been very slow due to some very real technical hurdles – low (1024×600) screen resolution, and a processor that simply wasn’t intended for intensive graphics and photo post-processing needed to create them. Wrestling with 5 FPS and waiting for more than hour for the images to compile is tedious tedious tedious.

Tweaking after stitching is minimal – I boost saturation, contrast and brightness slightly, otherwise the images will tend to look a little dull on screen.

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Gun’drak

From WoWWiki:

This is the Drakkari capital, the only large city in Zul’Drak and the home to the Drakkari Frost King. It is a massive place, with thick walls, tall guard towers and heavy gates. Inside, the buildings are tiered and covered in steps, and wind about one another like a nest of small animals, each fitting into the next.

Utgrade Pinnacle

From Wowhead:

Utgarde Keep is the first dungeon hub located on the shores of Lake Cauldros in the Howling Fjord of Northrend. Inhabited by the vrykul (led by King Ymiron), a half-giant Viking-like race bent on proving their strength to the Lich King, they are raising the most worthy of their warriors to serve him beyond the grave here at their main base of operations.

I braved the inclement horribly shitty weather to take some photos of the Abbey church on Eglinton Street.

As I have a terminal lack of anything to do tonight, I’m going to fill in some of my workflow on the photo. The first step is to actually get the photos from my memory card, for which I use a shell script. It does nothing exciting and I don’t accept any responsibility if it accidently dumps ten thousand photos into one folder (which happened to me). There’s not much to say for the script, it takes all the .cr2 files from the memory card and places them under ~/Pictures/Imports in a subfolder, going by today’s date – 2006-12-31.

After that, I import the photos to Lightroom:

Workflow 1

Normally I’d use the raw editor to screw with whatever aspect of the photo needed screwing with, but in this case I wanted to compose a HDR shot in Photoshop, so I just exported the three photos I wanted to tiff format and used the HDR function in Photoshop to create the final photo. I used Photomatix before, but in 90% of shots people go utterly overboard with tone mapping, which leads to a horribly fake and cartoony image, which was never to my tastes when it came to HDR. Going through the HDR group on Flickr I find this and this.

Workflow 2

Creating a HDR photo in Photoshop is insanely easy if you have good shots taken, so I’ll skip on the detailed instructions. Suffice to say, to pick File-> Automate-> Merge to HDR, click a few buttons and go get a coffee if that’s your thing. At this point I’ve composed the HDR, converted it to 16-bit for ease of work and straightened it:

Workflow 3

I’ve started working in layers where I can, I did a lot of tweaking of colours and lighting, with a little clone work for a few annoying cables and wires that were in the church:

Workflow 4

Squinting at the above picture, I had layers for the shadow/highlight tool, levels, hue/saturation, curves, colours and the channel mixer. And behold, the final shot:

Workflow 5

The Abbey