Semi-pro pictures for my blog

I had some problems finding the right title for this post and I am not sure if I have succeeded in creating one that fits the following article- so let's just say with some words what it is:
Taking pictures and processing the way I do it when I have not enough time for the proper way.

That said I want to tell you, that this is really not the way to take proper fotos of your minis. Sadly right now it is about as good a I can do since I have not enough room to use and store my final version. My son is two right now and will gladly pick up anything as a play thing he can find, so I need to build up my fotoset I want to useit and store it afterwads. So I came up with this trade-off which produces middle quality pics and can be put up and down rather easy.

This is my set-up right now. It is made of , cardstock, paper and three lights I also use for painting. The camera I use is either my Apple iPhone or my Sony Alpha-300.

Irfanview time. In case you don't know this program I strongly recommend it. It is free and you can get it here. Originaly developed only as a viewer it does most likely all the editing I need as an amateur. (I was a professional 3D-Artist for some years and used Photoshop all the time- but for this use I jst don't need such a monstertool).
So let's see what I did with it.

MyAlpha 300 produces this picuture. (I uploaded it in fullscale so you can see what it really is when you click it) Notice that I used no tripod and was on autofocus. I took the photo from quite a distance to keep all the models in the depth of field.

After opening in Ifranview I select the area of the picture I want to keep. Then I press CTRL+Y to crop it.

Since I know that my white balance was not perfect I use a simple Colorcorrection by pressing SHIFT+U. The result is nice- if you didn't notice the difference take a look at the next pic.

You can see the difference when I only applay it to half of the pic.

This gets me this.

The last thing I do is to scale it down by pressing STRG+R and selecting the sice I want. Usually this means 800 wide and keep proportions. That's it- There are many other funktions in there like the panormama function which I use to make one pictures out of my front and backshots.

I hope this helps some of you if only to find Irfanview. Have fun with it!