Advice for lighting model car / aircraft diorama

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taxboy

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As per the title I'm intending to photograph some model cars / aircraft and use an image as a backdrop to introduce a degree of realism. Has anyone done this and can offer advice on how to proceed or is it easier to photograph them against a pure white background and composite in Photoshop?

Any help appreciated
 
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Thanks for that, unfortunately can't always depend on the light when I've got the availability so would prefer the control of studio
 
The best way to recreate natural light on a model that size would be a large softbox to mimic the sky.

I'd firstly shoot some locations that'll give you the camera and light positions to shoot the models, with composites, authenticity is key and those elements are the starting point.

I'd shoot on white for masking, green would taint the colours on the models.
 
taxboy said:
As per the title I'm intending to photograph some model cars / aircraft and use an image as a backdrop to introduce a degree of realism. Has anyone done this and can offer advice on how to proceed or is it easier to photograph them against a pure white background and composite in Photoshop?

Any help appreciated
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I find it extraordinarily difficult to make convincing composite results. Things which need to match:
  • Lighting
  • Shadows
  • Focal length
  • Horizon lines
  • Vanishing points
  • White balance
  • Depth of field
Getting the apparent horizons of the two images lined up is much more important than you might think.

Then even if you have a clean background you need to develop ninja masking skills to do the cutout in the first place. The mask should normally be very slightly feathered, don't aim for a totally solid line. Getting a good mask is difficult but that's not enough on its own to make a composite work.

I've tried no end of times and binned the results. This has issues but is the one I'm happiest with:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/simoncarterphotography/27032821103/in/dateposted-public/

There are lots of on-line compositing tutorials, most of them rubbish - they all talk about the masking and not about the other issues.
There are also lots of software tools which claim to help with the masking. All the ones I've tried have been disappointing. I'm told the old version of Topaz Remask was actually quite good but it's no longer available.

It can help to apply some toning to the composited image to bring the disparate layers together.

Glyn Dewis's book may be worth a look, I haven't yet seen it myself.

You'll run into lots of the same sorts of issues if you print out an image and use it as a background. It might be easier overall, it might not.
 
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I had half guessed this would not be an easy ask to pull off convincingly. The steer towards Glyn Dewis is very helpful and I may turn this into a winter project.



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