Garmadon’s Morning Coffee
Today’s photo was inspired by a post on Foolish Bricks. I really like the final image from the light shining through the window, to the steaming cup of coffee and the overall scene. It could easily be me one Sunday morning.
And so, out came Lord Garmadon and the Temple of Resurrection so I could experiment.
The Shoot
I set up the temple opposite a window on a very bright morning. Lord Garmadon was set up with his coffee and I took a few shots at various angles. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was too bright and there was too much light on the mini-figure. His face was particularly bad so I had to move the set up.
Moving helped a lot and here is the original image I decided to start with.
My first step was to crop to get closer and remove some of the distracting elements at the edge of the frame. Next I made some basic adjustments to exposure, highlights, shadows, white and blacks. I added some saturation and vibrance too.
I used the radial filter to raise some exposure on Garmadon to help him stand out. Here is the image after basic edits.
Now time to head over the photoshop.
Post Processing
The first thing to do was create a gradient fill layer using a radial style. I moved this to the top right to simulate the morning sun shining into the temple. The “light source” is actually off the image but the effect lightens the room.
Next I created a gradient map to create a morning sunshine haze in the room. For me, this really helped create the effect I was going for.
Lastly I created a levels layer to touch up the final image.
Lighting affect created, all that was left was to use the brush tool to brush in the steam for Lord Garmadon’s hot coffee. The hardest part of this was finding the best brush but it was actually also the easiest part of the whole edit.
The final image.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the final image. Next time I want to create the effect of light shining through a window – or similar – rather than just the effect of the light in the room. What would you do different?
