Hordes Minions - Swamp Gobber and Totem Hunter

Painted

Last of the Hordes stuff for awhile. I painted these back in 2008 mainly to go along with Circle Orboros I've been showing lately and these round out the warband. Actually, maybe I'll try for a shot of the whole group so maybe another Hordes post coming soon after all.

I really like these gobber models and their fog effects in the game. Really happy with how they turned out. The rich green is thanks in part to P3 Necrotite Green, so strong no ink is needed! I did your classic red/green contrast thing here putting a number of different rich, reddish shades on them along with the obvious bandana, but I'm always really careful not to get anywhere near that Christmas feeling. I also try not to overdo the turquoise corrosian effect on copper but man, what a perfect excuse to do it here and it it's so easy to make it look great!

The totem hunter here is a rare Werner Klocke figure I've got few complaints about. In fact it's all good until you get to that skull, which I'm really kicking myself I didn't replace entirely. Well, that and his eyes on entirely on the side of his head, which makes him really ill suited as an, erm, predator. Man, and that's me trying to say something nice about the guy. ;) Anyway, pretty much followed the book illustration on this one. The weird blade gave some cool opportunities to blend with metallics and show some real contrast. I studied it under a strong light before painting and then followed what I saw.

These are on flickr per usual.

Hallelujah! Come to the Lightroom!

Photoshop Lightroom Review

I'm here on a Saturday afternoon seeing how many unfinished drafts I can polish off and schedule for the coming weeks. Here goes this one, which I've been wanting to post for some months. Yes, this one is a big block of text. But if you take pictures of miniatures, or anything really, I hope reading will be worth it to you.

If you've touched a digital photo recently and you haven't seen or used Photoshop Lightroom before, you should immediately go download a trial copy. Just be prepared to shell out $110 bucks because you aren't going to want to let it go at trial end. I've been using Photoshop for many years and have some solid expertise, and have the latest CS suite with Bridge. They are brilliant full stop. That said, trying to use Photoshop and Bridge to do the sorts of tasks I do for my pictures of miniatures is a bit like using a lawnmower to trim my hedges. Lifting the lawnmower up to cut vertically all these years has worn me to the bone, and I have an awful lot of hedges in my garden.

In fact it's an apples to oranges kind of comparison really. Whatever you do, don't think of Lightroom as some sort of Photoshop "Lite." It's not that. Not only does it share no code at all, it's not even coded in the same language. Whereas Photoshop is an amazing tool to take a photo and turn it into a work of art, or to begin making graphics and art from scratch, think about the core mission of Photoshop that's implied by the name "Photoshop." If you're running a shop it's all about repeatable processes, keeping track of things, maintaining a pipeline, organization. In Photoshop you have powerful macros and Bridge adds powerful organization, but neither of these tools accomplishes the mission with any kind of efficiency. And I'm really understating the problem by saying that. I think Adobe realized they weren't really succeeding at the original mission, that Photoshop had instead morphed into the perfect tool for another application, and built Lightroom to address the gap.

So let me say that for 100%, yes, 100% of tasks I used to use Photoshop for Lightroom does better by orders of magnitude impossible for me to exaggerate. All hyperbole aside it may be the most perfect application I've ever used. It does organization and collection management, metadata, retouching, calibration, processing, cropping and publishing and it does it in way that I have to call revolutionary. In a few months of owning it I've found religion and I honestly will never look at a digital image the same way again. It's not even a stretch to say that in giving me a more intuitive feel over the science of color and light, which I already understood fairly well from my classical art education, Lightroom has literally caused me to see the world in a new way from this point forward.

Now before I get all wound up about this thing and start raving, don't take my word for it and whatever happens go download a free trial of it and watch the really great introductory tutorials they have. There's just too much to say about all the different features and aspects and Julieanne Kost explains them a lot better and more concisely than I can. Incidentally what a dream job to have, demonstrating Adobe products!

What might be of some value to add to that, though, is my own case story. Let me contrast my life before and after and try to impart how much good this thing has done for me. In the Photoshop (or Gimp) way you start either in Bridge or in your folders or in Picasa or iPhoto and you copy your digital negatives from your camera. You might start grouping them into a collection. Then you open them in Photoshop or Gimp and wind up making a psd copy/Gimp equivalent with your adjustments, crops, etc. Then you save a web copy to your computer, usually another directory. You have two or three directories of stuff for the one set of pictures at this point. If you're smart, you macro all of the above adjustments and web copy and run through the whole collection. Otherwise you are really in for a sad time and you have my special sympathy. Next if you're smart you'll go and tag your pictures in Bridge and do the titles, etc. But the shit part is you don't want to just tag the web copies. Do you spend the time to tag the digital negatives as well? Then you go back to Bridge or Picasa, or the (shoddy) Updatr flickr app and upload to your picture hosting service of your choice. If your hosting service is flickr and you didn't tag your pictures, you then have to go micromanage things on the flickr end. The whole process takes hours. If anything goes wrong, you have to redo many of the steps. Each step is dependent on the next. This describes my digital pictures nightmare before Lightroom.

Now the Lightroom way. I stick in my flash card and Lightroom opens and starts an import. The digital negatives are automatically numbered and stored in a convenient system (which I can configure to my heart's content if I really want to but works perfectly out-of-the-box). That is there is there's a database on the backend. Then I select the thumbnails I want to group and hit ctrl-N to group them into a collection (which offers hierarchy, unlike Picasa). I weed out the ones I don't want using one of several great tools specifically for this purpose. Then I take one photo and slide some sliders to fix the white balance, contrast, etc. I crop the photo, retouch with a spot tool or adjustment brush etc if needed (hardly ever in my case but just letting you know it's there). Then I hit ctl-altl-c ctl-alt-v to copy and paste all the adjustments(no more macros!!! Seriously, let that sink in) to all of the photos. If any crops resulted in a figure being a little off-center, I can browse to the image and move the figure in the frame with the hand tool. I then highlight the collection and enter the metadata using stored metadata tags packages. Once tagged and titled I drag the collection to my flickr publishing service and hit publish. The pictures arrive tagged and titled in flickr with the one click. The whole process above from start to finish takes about five minutes. Yes, five minutes compared to literally an hour or more previously. And if anything goes wrong, it takes about thirty seconds to redo any and everything. No step is dependent on anything. The lack of dependency from one step to another is another thing where it's hard to convey here how much time and headache this saves.

But the real miracles start here. The whole process creates zero (0) extra pictures files on your drive to keep track of. There is no psd file, no jpg file. There is no web copy on my hard drive—it exists only on flickr. There is just the digital negative, with an auto-created-and-managed piggy-back file to keep track of the on-the-fly adjustments I've made (all of which can be rolled back, altered again, etc). Also, say I'm on flickr the next day and decide the pictures are too dark. Or I forgot some tags. Back in Lightroom I fix one image and paste to the whole collection. Fine. And lo, at that point Lightroom pulls all the images from the published list of pictures and let's me know I might want to republish them as they've been updated. When I click publish, it updates the pictures on Flickr without a hassle and just the one click. I can also delete pictures from flickr from within Lightroom without touching flickr (anything to stay out of that time-suck web-app!).*

At the end of the day all my pictures are organized in collections (once), tagged and described, published.

The above is just a really basic scenario, too, and haven't started talking about how amazing and intuitive all the tools at your disposal are within the app and how not only does it cut the time down by a factor of twenty (!) or more it also produces results I could never do. I could never fix my camera's failings with regard to purple (comes out a dull blue-grey) or my struggles clearing up a white background without resorting to the time-consuming selection tool.

And I actually have a lot of fun doing it, where Photoshop was drudgery plain and simple. Again, that's easy to gloss over when you're reading this, but turning drudgery into fun is in itself a revolution. I don't want to sell Photoshop (or Bridge, or Picasa for that matter) short, though, as they are all amazing tools that can do really great things. When you're creating in Photoshop (as opposed to macro-ing white balance settings) Photoshop is equally fun. But if your work starts and ends with a photograph (as opposed to constructing a image more or less from scratch that happens to incorporate photographic elements) there is no question what the right tool is. Back to that question of the lawnmower, etc.

All this said, there is one downside to my Lightroom experience, though I can't fault Lightroom. That is, I use a nine-year-old, 4MP Canon G3 camera, which was considered "prosumer" at the time but obviously technology has gone forward since then. I think it gives me really good pictures, but even before Lightroom I was aware of some of it's shortcomings with regard to capturing color and light. Lightroom, while it gives the user many tools to overcome these shortcomings (for instance the problem with purple I mentioned), at the same time it brings one directly in contact with them. The flaws are right in my face and inescapable. It's especially true after I switched from JPEG to RAW format. Maybe more on this later, but essentially I find myself hitting my head on the ceiling in terms of the quality of pictures I want to get, and it may be time for a new camera.

And I mentioned it costs, what, a fifth the price of Photoshop, right? If you take more than a handful of pictures a month, you need this thing. Hell, if you take just a handful of pictures a year you still need this thing. But if you made it this far you deserve a break. I feel a bit like Sifl and Olley plugging something for Precious Roy so I'm going to stop. I'm not kidding about the Lightroom though. You own it to yourself.

* I do need to point out that since the recent Flickr overhaul this ability to update pictures in Flickr from within external applications is only available to those pro members, and pro accounts are no longer being sold, that is you have to have been grandfathered in to have one.

Thank you followers and subscribers!

100!

To mark Belched from the Depths reaching 100 followers I'd like to take a moment to thank all my followers and other subscribers for your interest, comments and shared appreciation for the kinds of games and miniatures I cover here.

It's not always an easy road. A blog with a niche interest is one thing if you play to that core interest. In my case I've got several interests, all niche, which means some of you may have arrived for the old school D&D, and others for the Necromunda or Hordes, etc. I fear, for example, that by including so much miniatures content I'm unlikely to gain real traction among the OSR blogs, even though I feel a strong affinity with them. But, since there's no way I'm doing multiple blogs I have to simply trust that what I find cool many of you will too, even if it's not what you came for. And if I haven't posted that stuff you like best in awhile, hopefully it all comes around to cover all the bases in short enough cycles. There's lots more of everything coming down the pipe I'm excited to share, that is I've got over thirty drafts of posts and add more all the time, it's just a matter of how much time I can carve out to keep the posts rolling out.

Thanks again, all, I wouldn't be doing it without your interest and support!

Remembering Featherstone

Since Donald Featherstone passed away last week a good number of people have posted remembrances, and in case you missed them, here is a small few:

• At the Wargames Foundry
• At the Vintage Wargaming blog
• At Hill Cantons
• At Greyhawk Grognard

While for many Featherstone was primarily an influence on their early experience of wargaming, Featherstone loomed largest over my own gaming experience in the last five years or so. This, quite frankly, because I was disappointed in the contemporary wargaming discourse and I was wondering what may have been lost over the years in terms of culture and ideas. The OSR, which to this point, to my knowledge, has only been in reference to roleplaying provides a model for this. That in going back to the roots of the hobby we can see the other paths not taken or abandoned and explore them. But I haven't seen it applied to much to wargaming.

There are people exploring these ideas in the public sphere, in places like on the Vintage Wargaming blog, but in the forums I frequent mention of the old ways is usually in passing and in the past tense, of the kind that begin something like, "I recall back when I was a lad we would...." or simply, "ah, Featherstone, those were the days..." and then after a sentence or two that's the end of it.

Anyway, back a few years ago I was looking for some historical gaming material, and thought it strange again, that very similarly to how there was little talk of the old ways on forums, there was little available on the web or file sharing networks in terms of old material, this is stark contrast again to roleplaying, where for anyone interested you can find the whole history and all the primary sources readily to hand. Maybe it's just more obscure and I haven't stumbled into the right spheres, so don't take my word for it that's not there. But I wound up going to the library where, at my library anyway, Featherstone was the only source on the shelf. That's how I came to Featherstone.

That there was just a single volume on wargmaming at the main library of a major metropolitan city was sad in and of itself, but Featherstone's Complete Wargaming was everything I had hoped it to be, a real window into a world that I saw reflected pretty much nowhere in contemporary wargaming. On the one hand there is a frame of reference that can be communicated in a book on the topic of wargaming as opposed to a set of rules itself, which affords fewer opportunities of this sort, but on the other hand there is a way that he is always moving between a historical reference to a particular tactic or a particular even to how you would start to build a game around it. There's a thin membrane between history and mechanics and a fluid exchange between them, with mechanics rough and custom-fit to serve the particular purpose at hand.

Since that trip to the library I've bought my own copy of that book in particular and read it several times. It's been a huge relief to me, and I've put a number of Featherstone's ideas to practice in my own designs my friends and I are playtesting.

Before anyone gets ideas, I want to make it clear I don't claim to be an expert on old school historical wargaming or on Featherstone in particular. I've only just begin to get my feet wet. But I think there is an awful lot of room for us to not just honor and remember the old ways and the forefathers of wargaming, but to give them the same treatment that roleplayers have given the D&D phenomenon and guys like Gary Gygax. While, surely, many will miss Featherstone, he's still with us, in print even. Here's to the man and may his legacy live on in our games.