From humble beginnings…

Seriously, I did this picture because I was frustrated with another project and felt like making something I could call finished, but I didn’t have any images in my head. So I decided, what the hell, I’ll duplicate a professionally made picture and call it a lighting exercise (and, hey, good lighting is important, and being able to figure out whatever the lighting setup was used at a glance is danged useful). So I picked the first (and so far, only) CGI still from the new Babylon 5 direct-to-DVD anthology series, “The Lost Tales.” This particular shot is from the opening sequence, and is itself a redo of a shot from the final episode of Babylon 5.

As with most of my recent pictures, the magic happened in Photoshop, where I began my customary bloom effect. Also, rather than just reducing the saturation of the picture, I duplicated the image on a new layer, made the duplicate grayscale in the channel mixer with a bias toward the blue channel, and then reduced the opacity of that layer. Finally, I applied a slight gaussian blur so that the Photoshop grain didn’t look so perfectly pixeled.

Screencap from “The Lost Tales” that this picture is based on.

Not too much to tell about this image, really. Originally, I wanted to try to get the raw, high-contrast look that the early Babylon 5 publicity renders had, so I made a fairly boring image with intent to brighten it up later in Photoshop. Well, that didn’t work out.

About a week later, I was looking at some photography websites, and decided that I needed to experiment with more techniques, not just someday, but that right then. So I pulled up the image from my harddrive, and thought back to a magazine article on making better-looking black and white photos by using the “Channel Mixer” in Photoshop instead of just de-saturating the image. A few minutes of balancing red, green, and blue, adding a little light bloom, and some film grain to complete the effect, and I had a much better image. It’s now become one of my favorites.

Rising Star (Black and White)

If you’re curious, here’s the original color image.

Also, as a bonus, here’s another render from a while ago that I didn’t bother posting on it’s own, because it was a remake of an older image that was so flat and boring that I, apparently, never bothered to post it on-line. Admittedly, this one got a bit more of a makeover than my HD rerenders normally get (usually it’s just swapping in some area lights for planet and nebulae fill lights).