Can anyone help?

This part of a backscene I did for one of the club layouts.  the white rectangle are where low relief build are going.


view large image here http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s16/hastran/Havantacloo%20Central/backscenesmall_zpsc57326bb.jpg

I've been tweaking the Windward ones a bit more  with the addition of some bits that one of our group members had scanned or downloaded from somewhere. the intention is to use them on the group layout. I took the number 3 that Trevor did a double act on which started as this



and did a copy paste with these



then played about with cut and paste, chroma masks, changing colours and clone tools to finish up with this, I still need to work on the sky so that it will match up with a sky sheet. The print out will be 900mm x 210mm on banner paper, a sky sheet of the same size will be mounted immediately above after chopping off the margins.



The trees on the hill at the right were copied with the clone tool from the trees among the houses, they help to disguise the join between the new sky and the original hill; for part of the level top of the hill  I masked then copied the sloping bit of hill, pasted it in tilted so that it was level.

This was another treatment of the number 3 with bits of number 4 substituted

A few fiddles for changing images.

I mentioned chroma masks in the above post, I'm using a fairly old photo processing app called Micrografx Picture Publisher, I started using it in 1991 when I got my first scanner, that was v2, I'm now using the last version v10,  Corel bought Micrografx and more or less buried it a few years back, it does all I need and the learning curve has been mastered; if that has a chroma mask then most other apps should have something similar.

Basically it allows me to select a colour or range of colours, say sky colours, blues, greys and white, it then masks all the colours selected, you can then copy the area so masked, or alter the colour balance, brightness, contrast, or cut it out, if you copy it you can then paste it elsewhere on the image or on another image, when pasting you can usually stretch,  shrink or rotate it. if you paste it as a "new image" you can flip it horizontally, vertically or diagonally, then copy/paste it  elsewhere.  I use it mainly to alter colours, typically the sky on the Windward images, doesn't match the images of sky that I have, so I put both images on screen then I chroma mask the sky on the Windward image and then tweak the colour balance until I have a reasonable match. You can also invert the mask so that everthing except the selected colours is masked, so for example select the sky colours, invert the mask and copy everything except the sky; you have an image that has poor colours, selct the ones yu want to change in a chroma mask, then change the colur balance, contrast brightnes etc until you have the result you want.

I make a habit of copying doors and windows of kits, I'll make a number of copies of each and alter colours on some so I have a range of doors, windows etc ready for the next scratch build or kit bash.

There used to be some sky images linked from Scalescenes in a section about the South Oak Road layout, but links to it no longer work.

I spent a while this morning on Google searching for images I could use in backscenes, found some shop fronts that could be pasted onto some Townscene type buildings and some quite useable sky scenes. Also things like tractors, farm animals and farm workers to paste into some of the Windward scenes after some tweaking and resizing. for example a small herd of cows and a flock of sheep, (separate images) reduced considerably, pasted into  fields then using the clone tool at pixel level, covered over the grass they had been on with grass from the field they were now in.
Windward backscene 4 as downloaded


Modified colours, different sky, 2 lots of cows, 1 of sheep (towards top left), a tractor and a farmworker, an extra cottage (above farmworker). Some changes at the left to match onto another sheet. I think the tractor is a bit overscale, so will probably erase it and replace with a smaller version.

Changing the basic colour balance to get better greens screwed up the original sky so I masked out the original and pasted the hills onto part of a sky sheet.

I'm the same with locos and rolling stock, hardly anything is left as it comes out of the box - even if it's only renumbering!

I don't use Photoshop (refuse to pay Adobe's extortionate prices), the app I use is Picture Publisher, getting a bit ancient now but does what I want, I've been using it since version 2 in 1991, now on the last version, V10 issued after Corel bought out Micrografx in 2001 then they dropped it, incorporated some bits in their own apps. Now a few sites offer a free download of V10!

Forgive this numpty-ish question, but rather than loading a number of A4 sheets into an A4 printer and then assembling them into a continuous sheet, couldn't one rig a roll of suitable paper above the feed slot of a printer….or does a printer need to know here it is by getting to the end of each A4 sheet?

I think this is what Post 57 was inferring…

Doug

Hi Doug,
 
I did have an Epson printer (it died) that you could load a roll into but it would only be 210mm or 8 and a quarter inches wide or high.
To get a 297mm or roughly 11 and a half inches high you would need an A3 printer and they are serious money. It would be cheaper to get the backscene printed at a specialist printers.
 
Simon

Doug, some printers with a manual input tray can be set to print longer than single sheet, be it an A4 = 210 mm or A3 = 297mm, The OKI laser I have will print up to 1M x210mm, the A3 OKI can do up to about 1.2M or 1.3M x297mm, the cheapest A4 OKI  able to do this costa about £142, the A3 is more serious money I think about £600+, did see a refurb A3 on fleabay for about £350.

Phew! Thats a lot of beer tokens, as suggested a 'perfeshnul' would seem the most realistic way unless you were going to be making a lot of 7mm models, perhaps.

Thanks,

Doug

It's not just the long backscenes that I like the laser for, it will print to card up to about 200gsm, I also print textures like stone, brick & tiles etc onto label stock or self adhesive vinyl also print vinyl coach sides, so it gets plenty of modelling use. Prints are waterproof so don't need varnishing unless you want a more glossy or more matt finish.

could some one please email all these back ground files to me many thanks in advance. pm me for email address

Hi Trev,

I just checked the files that Ken sent me and I posted as a group of over twenty of them back in May 2012. The average size seems to be about 12-15Kb. 

The problem is that at that size, they will not take much enlargement if at all because of their low size and other  Internet versions are generally speaking not going to be large either
When I started the thread, I guess I was thinking that we could get some "panoramic views" that could be strung together so we could all share them. 
Gormo has another thread related to buildings which could be applied to scenes and when I get time, I will sit down and play around with pix I have taken  and merge them perhaps with other areas… at the moment I really need to be asleep between the hours of 3 and 5 in the morning!

Cheers
Trevor ( the one in Oz)

G`day Trevors,
   If you google " british countryside panoramas " and click on images, there are quite a few images with very large resolutions.      For example….one of the bigger ones….12537 x 3035 and below a typical panorama

  
:cheers  Gormo

The Windward ones have been linked earlier in this thread, for those who can't be bothered or don't know how to look that far back here they are again

http://windward.f1p.co.uk/download/pages/Backscenes.html.

G`day Mike,

  Thanks for the info and have a nice day!!!
:cheers  Gormo