Printing your own landscape backdrops

My experience with a 72 cm doll is that you need more like 5' by 4' if they are standing. If you can request a matte surface, I would, but I would also do something a lot easier if you have Photoshop--take the picture of the doll on a blue or green colored background that you can select and erase, and layer in the small size Flickr CC licensed content. For printing you need 300 pixels per inch and at 4 or 5 feet, that adds up to an enormous filesize. Even the versions of Pshop like Elements or PaintShop Pro can do the layering you'd want to do for this. trickiest part is getting the light to match--but once you get the knack of 'shopping in backgrounds you can drop in your own photos as well.

 

Since you use Pshop this might be Too Much Info, but open your original file of you doll photo, go to Image> Duplicate, rename it to something you can remember (or just something like CoppeliaGarden2), and close your original file. That way any oopses will be on the new file

Then go to Layer >Duplicate Layer to create a second duplicate layer of your new file. Clear the background(bottom Layer) to white (I click on that layer in the layer palette, Select >All, then do Edit>Fill 100% default White, but there are a million other ways to do this)
Now Save your file, so the History brush can restore anything you accidentally kill on Layer No 2.

Go up to the second layer, take the Magic Wand set on 10% tolerance and select the background color.
Then hit Edit>Clear to clear most of the background. For the leftover tendrils you can select a leftover chip of green and then use "select similar" to grab just the color of the green screen, and then do Edit> Clear again if you are brave, or take the eraser on 90% and rub over the crawling ants of the selection, which means you have some control over erasing, and if you have a green tie the tie doesn't suddenly disappear. (Usually the History brush will revive it if you do). The Select Similar on 10% is pretty good about just yanking out the pixels of that exact (hopefully funky) green you were using. This part is sort of an inexact science--I usually zoom in and manually clean around tendrils, and blur some with the Blur tool if it's too picky.

Next open your background file, and Select All, then Copy and Paste over the background layer of your CoppeliaGarden file. Often the pasted file will be way small, so you will have to take Edit>Transform, and scale it up (constrain the aspect ratio, in P7 there is a chain icon at the top of the Transform toolbar, but there may be other ways in later version). Or you can just drag the handles and eyeball it until it's the size you want. If it gets pixelly because the file was microscopic, try Gaussian Blur the enlarged version--it will end up just looking like you used a macro lens, which can be nice. There are programs that will resample and scale up amazingly (Genuine Fractals by Adobe) but it's not cheap.

If the light is wackily different, you can go to your top layer and duplicate that layer (as a safety precaution) and try Filter>Render>Lighting effects to see if you can fake the light with a spotlight or one of the other options. Because you are on a separate layer, you can also take a pretty harsh effect and turn down the opacity on the layer, or try a Layer Option like Screen or Multiply to see what it does with the layer under it. If you hate it, you can always trash the upper layer.

One note--if you want to use the Lens Flare (and who doesn't?) it wants to use the whole image to create it, not just part of an upper layer. Usually I will duplicate the whole image, rename it, flatten it, and then run the Lens Flare on it. If it's too cheesy Undo or ControlZ (or Command Z, I think on Macs) will fix it.

Hope that helps

PS the Clone tool is really awesome for making the background more fun--cover things with leaves, clone out signs, clone on more hair on your doll. You can even clone from a second file, though the two files need to be similar in size or it's hard to stay aligned.

 

I have camera envy! You will love that camera--I still use a point and shoot because I am cheap.. and clumsy If you don't mind lugging around your doll outside, just hold it up to people height and do a head-and -shoulders shot against the background--you'd be amazed at how convincing that can be! A third arm and a piece of white paper can fill in the shadow side of your doll with light--you do need a friend or a tripod or tentacles to hold the camera, the doll and the fill-in paper, though.

 

Question.
I have a friend that hangs a blue or green tarp in his background and on the floors so that he can then digitally transpose any backdrop he wants into the photo afterwards. He sets up the forground with his props and people in their costumes and takes many many photo's. Then chooses which one's he likes best. Once he finds which one's are his favorites of the lot he then puts in the backdrops out of his digital library. Would that work also for BJD Photography?

 

Yes, it would. I was going to recommend that. It is however much more technically complicated in practice than it might appear at first glance. Its a trade off in time vs. quality. To do it convincingly will require a quite a bit of skill and in general more time than printing a back drop and photographing the doll and back drop at the same time. The pay off is allowing shots that may not be possible. (i.e. your SD on the ISS or something like that.)

Bobby

 

I didn't see this earlier, but if you ARE interested in printing a backdrop, I'd check around with local printers. At my workplace we have a 60" plotter and can print on vinyl, canvas, paper (matte or gloss), etc. at large sizes. For us, we can enlarge images up to 4 times without losing quality, so that will help immensely with resolution. Ideally you want your image to be 300 dpi at 1/4 size or larger for our particular plotter. You can get away with a bit lower resolution than that (though I wouldn't go below 150 dpi), but quality will begin to decline. We can also mount the prints on foam core boards, and even put a matte laminate over it. Many print shops have this capability - and if the one you call doesn't, they can probably tell you who does in your area!

It's not something that is cheap, but if you'll use it often it may be worth it.

 

From experience though especially when you are printing to super impose an object over it, resolution shouldnt be too big an issue. As you are not exactly going to look into the background image, 200dpi or even as low as 100 dpi may work as your doll wont exactly be next to the background: putting it next to it will create another issue in lighting and whats not. Also if you are using a DSLR and considering you are shooting a doll, the background is likely to blur out slightly, as such high resolution on the backdrop is quite wasted in most sense.

For size, depending on what is the purpose, probably twice the height of the doll will do fine. To me the width is probably more critical as you dont want to be stucked in one angle and also unless you have tons of space to use telephotos , you would want your width to be significant so that your view wont go out of the canvas. For 60+cm doll, I would probably want something like 1.2m high and 80cm wide at the very min (portrait only shot) . Else a landscape of 1.2m x 1.8m wide will probably work better. This translates to 4 feet by 6 feet prints.

Anyway taking a pic of a doll with a backdrop behind is actually as complicated as super imposing in photoshop. Factors like how the backdrop is litted, the shadows that will fall on it, the general direction of the light itself in the photo in relation to the subject, your focal angel and settings will all add to the complexity. There is also the issue of hotspots on the background unless you have proper lighting systems.

 

I found this post and find it very interesting.

When weather is too bad I do indoor pics like this:



In order to have it I print and paste a background that I have previously taken.
I do some and you are free to use them for your pics, I put them on creative commons rights (free personnal use, payed commercial use), feel free to use them at will.

http://zorg2000.deviantart.com/gallery/34418216

 

You can print your backdrop at home very cheap and easy all you need is a printer and this website http://www.blockposters.com/

This website enlarge your picture and divide it into A4 size pages and then creates PDF file to download. Then all you have to do is to glue it together. I used this method many times and here's an example



as you can see there's wood backdrop I just download it from free stock website (I think the size of the picture was 3000x1900) and uploaded it again on the postermaker site and created the PDF (I think the no. of pages was 16) it was perfect size for my large dolls (both dolls are on POPODOLL 68cm female and male bodies)

I hope this tip helps you^^

 

Thank you both for sharing your photos and for the links! That is so helpful!

 

Thank you so much for sharing, it looks awesome!!!

 

Thank you so much for this info, it realy helps a lot!!