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.