Just For Fun!

GW2, Photoshop CS5, Lightroom, Silver Efex Pro 2

Today was wet and rainy again, and I had to work for most of it. With the outdoor options being very cold and muddy, the boys had been playing our favourite video game, Guild Wars 2, while I was at work. When I got back they asked if it was possible to take a photograph of their characters in the game.

This virtual group portrait became an interesting challenge - the first being to find a good location with an uncluttered backdrop, and eliminate monsters from the site of the shoot! I tried photographing the screen but the resulting images suffered badly from moire. We then experimented with screenshot software, but had issues with heavy pixellation. In the end, after a fairly complex process involved a few rounds of image enlarging and bicubic smoothing in Photoshop, I ended up with an image I could treat like a real photograph in Silver Efex Pro 2.

So after all that - we have our virtual group photo. From the left: Gabriel, Monty, me, Rafferty and Milo. Normal photographic blip service will resume tomorrow!