We Print Miniatures Workbench Guides
The Miniature Photo Bench
A 32mm model is a small subject with a lot going on. Get three things right and a phone will give you a photo that looks like a studio took it.
Almost every disappointing miniature photo fails for the same three reasons. The camera was too close, the light came from the wrong place, and the white balance was left on auto. None of those cost money to fix.
This is the setup we use on our own bench, and it works just as well with a phone as with a camera. It takes ten minutes to build the first time, then every model you shoot gets the same treatment.
What you actually need
- A phone from the last few years, or any camera with manual controls.
- Two lamps of the same type. Desk lamps are fine as long as both bulbs match.
- Something to soften them. Baking paper, a white plastic bag, a cheap light tent.
- A plain backdrop. A sheet of mid grey card is better than white.
- Something to hold the camera still. A mini tripod, a stack of books, a mug.
- A grey card, or a sheet of plain white printer paper standing in for one.
A blower or a soft brush earns its keep as well. Resin loves dust.
Where to put the camera
Stand back further than feels right, then crop.
Distance is the setting nobody thinks of as a setting. Move in close and the nearest part of the model grows, so you get a big nose, a huge shield and tiny feet. Stand back and use a longer lens and the proportions stay true to the sculpt.
The main camera on a phone won't focus closer than about 10cm. Push past that and it either hunts back and forth or quietly switches to the ultra-wide lens for a macro shot, which bends the model out of shape. Both outcomes look worse than standing back. Only got one lens? Shoot from about 20cm and crop in.
Tap the diagram to open it full size.
Camera placement. Back off to 25 to 30cm and let the longer lens do the work. Put the lens on the model's eye line rather than above it, and leave a hand's width of air between the model and the backdrop so the background falls away clean.
Shooting down turns a character into a game piece. Our sizes are measured from the base of the foot to the eyes, so that line is easy to find.
- Distance
- 25 to 30cm for a 28mm to 35mm model, a little more for 55mm and 75mm.
- Lens
- The 2x or 3x camera on a phone, or 60mm to 100mm of macro on a camera.
- Height
- Lens centred on the model's eye line, never above it.
- Backdrop
- Around 20cm behind the model, so it falls out of focus.
Where to put the lights
Two lamps, both softened, both the same colour.
Light is what makes a paint job read on screen. Even light from directly in front shows your blending honestly but flattens the sculpt, so cloaks, brows and armour plates stop reading as shapes. Light arriving from one side at an angle puts a bright side and a shadow side on the model, which brings the form back. Most people want a bit of both.
Set a key light at roughly 45 degrees to one side and 30 to 45 degrees above. Put a second lamp on the other side at about half the brightness, which opens the shadows without erasing them. If both lamps are identical, you get that half by moving the fill back rather than by dimming it. At about 1.4 times the key's distance it halves, and at twice the distance it drops to a quarter. If you only have one lamp, a piece of white card propped where the second lamp would go does the same job for nothing.
If you're photographing to document paintwork rather than to make a display shot, push the fill closer to the key's brightness. Aim to throw the shadow onto the backdrop rather than onto the model.
Tap the diagram to open it full size.
Lighting plan, seen from above. Key at 45 degrees for form, fill at half power to keep the shadow side readable, optional rim behind to lift the model off the backdrop.
Set the fill's power with its distance if you can't dim it. Both front lamps get a diffuser, because a bare bulb this close to a small model puts a hard pinpoint highlight on every edge.
Tap the diagram to open it full size.
Lamp height, seen from the side. Light falling from above reads as daylight and puts shadow under the brow, the chin and the cloak. Light arriving level with the model reads as a torch in the face, and it sprays straight past onto the backdrop.
Two rules that matter more than the positions
Use one colour of light
Turn the room lights off and close the curtains, or shoot by window light with the lamps off. A ceiling bulb mixing with a daylight lamp and a bit of afternoon sun gives you three different colours landing on one model, and no white balance setting can separate them afterwards.
Buy the boring specification
Lamps rated 5000K to 5600K with a CRI of 95 or higher. Cheap low CRI bulbs are weakest on reds, so a red cloak photographs as dull brick and no amount of editing brings it back.
Unpainted grey resin needs a slightly harder setup than a painted model. Pull the fill light back or drop the white card further away, because on bare resin the shadows are the only thing showing the detail.
Getting the colour right
Auto white balance guesses. Give it something to measure instead.
Auto white balance looks at the whole frame and decides what should be neutral. Point it at a model with a big red cloak and it tries to average that red away, dragging every other colour with it. Put a grey card in shot and it has nothing to guess about.
Checking is quick. Photograph a grey card or a sheet of plain white printer paper under your lights and look at its colour values. If red, green and blue come back roughly equal, the white balance is right and every colour on the model is being reported honestly.
Tap the diagram to open it full size.
Reading a grey card. The card is the only thing in the frame you already know the answer for. If its three colour values match, everything else in the shot is honest. This fixes a colour cast. It can't fix mixed lighting, which is why the lamps come first.
On a phone
Tap the model's face, then hold until the exposure and focus lock. That stops the colour drifting between shots.
If your phone has a pro mode, set white balance to a fixed number matching your lamps rather than auto.
If it doesn't, shoot one frame with a sheet of white paper in shot and correct all your frames to it later. Any editor's white balance picker will do it. Click the paper and the colour cast is gone.
Turn off scene enhancement, beautify and anything that promises to improve colours. They shift skin tones and saturate reds.
On a camera
Take a custom white balance reading off the grey card under your lights, then leave it fixed.
Or set the Kelvin value by hand to your lamps' rating.
Shoot RAW if you plan to edit at all. It makes colour corrections painless.
Camera and phone settings
One setting decides how much of the model is sharp.
At this distance, depth of field is measured in millimetres. Wide open, you can have the eyes sharp and the shield already gone. The aperture is the lever, and there's a limit to how far it's worth pushing, because beyond about f/16 the image starts softening everywhere from diffraction.
Tap the diagram to open it full size.
The sharp zone at each aperture. f/8 to f/11 is the working range for a single frame. Focus stacking shoots several frames at a wider aperture, each focused a little further back, and merges them, which is how you get a whole model sharp without the diffraction penalty. Phones have a fixed aperture, so on a phone the equivalent lever is standing further back.
- Lens
- 2x or 3x, no digital zoom
- Distance
- 25 to 30cm
- Focus
- Tap the eyes, hold to lock
- Exposure
- Slide down 0.3 to 0.7
- White balance
- Locked, or 5200K in pro mode
- Flash
- Off
- Timer
- 2 seconds
- Support
- Mini tripod or braced
- Format
- Max resolution, RAW if offered
- Avoid
- Portrait mode, macro mode, HDR beautify
- Mode
- Manual
- Lens
- 60 to 100mm macro
- Aperture
- f/8 to f/11
- ISO
- 100 to 200
- Shutter
- As slow as it needs, the tripod carries it
- Focus
- Manual, live view magnified on the eyes
- White balance
- Custom off a grey card
- Release
- 2 second timer or remote
- Format
- RAW
- Stacking
- f/5.6, 4 to 8 frames
Portrait mode is the one to be careful with. It fakes the background blur by cutting the model out, and it makes a mess of spears, banners, wings and anything thin. Real blur from a real lens keeps every spike intact.
Is it actually sharp?
Check on the spot, because a soft photo can't be rescued later.
The screen lies. A photo that looks fine as a thumbnail falls apart the moment anyone views it properly, and by then the lights are packed away. Get into the habit of checking before you move on to the next model.
Zoom the preview right into the model's face. If you can see the edge of the eye dot, individual brush strokes and the fine print texture, it's sharp. If everything looks smooth and pleasant with no hard edges anywhere, it isn't. When it's soft, the picture tells you which problem you have.
Tap the diagram to open it full size.
Telling the two failures apart. Shake blurs the whole frame in one direction, so the backdrop goes with it. Missed focus leaves something in the frame perfectly sharp while the model is not, usually the backdrop or the front edge of the base. The fixes are different, so it's worth knowing which one you're looking at.
Before you press the shutter
- Is the camera resting on something, or on a timer? Handheld at this distance needs 1/125 or faster.
- Is the focus box on the model rather than the backdrop or the base front?
- Are exposure and white balance locked, so the next frame matches this one?
- Is there dust on the model? Look now, not in the edit.
- Is anything blowing out to pure white on the metallics or a gloss varnish? Drop the exposure a third of a stop.
- Take three frames and refocus between each. Autofocus misses more often than it admits, and one of the three will be the keeper.
Backdrops, bases and the small stuff
Mid grey beats white
A white backdrop blows out and fools the meter into darkening the model. Pure black swallows every shadowed area of the paint job. A mid grey card, or a soft sweep from grey to darker grey, keeps the model as the brightest thing in frame.
Curve the paper
Tape it to the wall and let it sweep down onto the table so there's no visible line behind the model. A cereal box and a sheet of card will do it.
Matt beats gloss
Gloss varnish throws a bright specular hit off every raised surface, and those hits land exactly where the detail is.
Showing size
Put a coin or a ruler in one frame alongside the model. Our sizes are measured from the base of the foot to the eyes, so a 32mm model and a 32mm ogre are not the same height, and a size reference saves a lot of explaining.
When it still looks wrong
The short version
Pin this above the bench
Stand back to 25 or 30cm and use the longer lens. Two softened lamps at 45 degrees, one at half the power of the other, both the same colour, with the room lights off. Set the white balance off a grey card instead of trusting auto. Hold the camera still, focus on the eyes, and zoom into the preview to check before you move on.
That's the whole thing. Everything else is practice, and practice is free.
Now go and shoot something
Written on the bench at We Print Miniatures. If you shoot something you're pleased with, we'd like to see it. 12,000+ models from leading independent designers, printed to order and ready to prime and paint.