Something I’ve wanted to do once I had access to a HD-quality Babylon 5 model was to recreate some of the early publicity shots of the show, the ones with the really blown-out contrast (probably because the on-line copies were scans of printouts, and not straight renders). I always thought the distortion made the station look more like a model.

Yesterday, some other B5 publicity shots were making the social media rounds, and I decided to try my hand at redoing this one, a moment from the third season premiere, “Matters of Honor.” Matching the lighting was a little tricky (and I’m not which differences are because I couldn’t get the angles right, the subtle variations between Kier’s model and the show version, or whether shadow-casting may have been turned off on the key light in the original shot), but my main focus was working in post. I brought up the blacks and increased the contrast, and desaturated the image a bit to get that second-generation reproduction feel. I didn’t even include any grain, this time.