Lego Hercules Behind The Scenes

I was gifted a Lego Disney mini-figure series 2 blind bag and was very pleased to get a Hercules figure. He’s a classic character with lots of potential to photography and add effects to.

It didn’t take me long to have a go.

The Set Up

I set Hercules up inside a box (to try and prevent reflection) with an iPad as a background. I used a rock to balance him and posed him to be looking into the camera. There were rocks around him but in the end I decided to focus in a bit closer and they actually weren’t necessary.

I also used my mobile phone to add some light to the mini-figure. I tried a few different angles and eventually decided to use this image.

Photoshop

As you can probably guess my first task was to remove the stand I’d used to make him appear to be jumping into battle. The clone stamp tool did the job with a little effort to make sure I cloned the background as it should have been.

I added a brightness and contrast adjustment layer to slightly increase both. I also added a slight saturation increase to the yellow channel to bring out the shield.

To help Hercules stand out I used a colour dodge layer to brighten him a bit more and make him stand out from a fairly bright background. I also used it to add a light flare to the end of his sword.

Effects

I felt pretty good about the image straight out of camera and all that was left was to add a couple of effects.

The bottom right hand corner just needed a dust image. I added some sparks to create the effect of jumping into battle. The final effect was to add some lightning. This was also the most difficult part of this edit. The blend mode was screen but because of the image I needed to use the brush tool on black to remove the edges of the placed image. Once I’d done it I copied the layer to increase it’s brightness and on a few occasions this meant I had to go back and remove edges that only appeared in the brightened image. Ultimately, it wasn’t that hard, just long, and once done, I liked the final affect.

I hope you like the final image. Please let me know what you think and what you would have done differently.

As I said earlier, I was gifted this mini-figure. But I did find it on amazon if you want to guarantee you get Hercules. In fact, I may even order my own Hades so watch this space…

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