Master & Apprentice II - Toy Photography Behind the Scenes

Master and Apprentice II, toy photography.

Hello and welcome back to another behind the scenes toy photography video! Today I'll show you how to light more than one lightsaber at a time.

I call this shot: Master and Apprentice II.

For this shot I used Luminara Unduli, Barriss Offee and Super Battle Droids from Hasbro's Star Wars the Black Series.

Attack of the Clones is a criminally underrated movie, especially considering how the arena fight on Geonosis is one of the coolest scenes in the entire Star Wars franchise. This week I thought I would recreate just a small part of that scene with the newly released Barriss figure.

I created my ground surface out of sand and a terrarium mat and began my setup by placing my two jedi front and centre.

This Barriss figure is taller than it should be, so I placed her in the back, and situated my camera nice and low to make it look like both characters were roughly the same size.

Next, I posed and placed my droids. Hasbro gave these super battle droids removeable heads and chest plates, which are great for creating a battle damaged look. Using a figure stand, I balanced one of the droid heads on top, to make it look like it had just been chopped off.

I also placed a few standard battle droids in the background to obscure the space between my ground surface and background TV.

Lastly, I finalized my lighting. In addition to a large soft box, I used a small led panel light to simulate the green lightsaber glow, and a small blue spotlight for the other saber.

Here's my starting image, without any of the green or blue light. My first task for this edit was to use layer masking to blend in the lightsaber light from separate exposures. The multiple exposures also allowed my to remove the figure stand behind my droid, as well as the glare from my softbox.

Once I was happy with the blend, I added adjustment layers for levels and colour balance.

After a slight cropping, I used the pen and brush tools to draw in the lightsaber blades, and some layer effects to add colour to them.

Next I used the healing brush tool to remove the articulation joints on my jedi.

Using some custom brushes, I added sparks to my droids to show that they had been dismantled only a split second before the shot.

And lastly, I made a few quick touchups, including dodging and burning my subjects faces to give them more definition.

So once again, here's my starting image.

And here's where I ended up!

Thank you so much for watching.

The Decisive Battle by Keys of Moon |   / keysofmoon  
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