Underwater month: playing with Lego, learning photoshop

[Soulgem]

This is part of a slightly larger article I wrote for my blog, so if you like to have some diving related anecdotes to accompany the pictures of Lego, as well as higher resolution pictures, follow this link: http://toysandbacon.blogspot.com/2011/09/ocean-week-lego-photoshopping.html

Enhancing pictures of Lego

I talked a bit about it a couple of days ago, building Lego in good company. Me and a few friends assembled the space shuttle last year. This year we brought out 4-5 big sets during our annual surfing trip. Among them was the Creator lighthouse, the Marina cafe and the new Atlantis temple. I never took good pictures of them until now, and I thought why not try out my photoshop skills. This is a program I'm in the process of learning, and it's a slow process. But I feel that every time I use it, I pick up a few new tricks.

Creator Lighthouse

This one was the first I made. It should be fairly obvious that this was not a huge success, but I guess you learn from your mistakes. I should have placed it on top of actual rocks, because now it just looks like it's floating in the ocean. I also tried to give it a color filter to make it look like the Northern Atlantic Ocean.

The Creator lighthouse is a marvelous piece, with a light brick that actually makes sense. The details are cute and it comes with a mini-figure. This is something I hope they continue with the bigger creator sets. We love the mini-figures.

Scuba divers and boat

The next was the boat that came with the marina cafe/harbor. I'll probably dedicate the entire Figure Friday to the marina, as it's such a fun piece. It includes a cafe/shop and a guard house with a four wheeled bike in addition to this boat. It also includes a handful of mini-figures - the wind surfer a few scrolls up being among them.

The boat is simple in build, but I like the details, the way you can store the additional scuba gear and the twin engines. For some reason, I feel it should have been white or green instead of blue.

With this image I tried to have one diver partially submerged, but it ended up looking a bit wonky. I guess I should have added ripples in the water. If anyone has a good way to do this, let me know.

Diver and the reef

Here's a diver from the new Atlantis line. They changed the color scheme from red/translucent green to red/translucent yellow. It may sound like a minor change, but the result is that the mini-figures don't quite match up with each other. They've also cut down on the monumental, transforming submarine vehicles that dominated the previous Atlantis line, which is a sad thing. Because who doesn't love gigantic underwater transforming vehicles? Other than that, I kinda like the colors of this diver, the lighter gray and yellow match up in a good way. The gigantic propeller seems a bit unnecessary, as I assume it would take just slightly less than that to give the diver underwater propulsion.

I also toyed around with a feature in photoshop called "lens flare". I see that the propeller should have had a rotating effect. Again, I am pretty clueless to what I'm doing, but if anyone wants to share their experience, go ahead.

Atlantis Temple

Finally, the big, sunken temple. Not as big as the one from the previous Atlantis line, but in my opinion a far superior Lego model. You still have a good selection of traps and hidden places, and the clean design - definitely Ancient Greek looking - just appeals to me in a way the previous model failed to do. I've added a diver from the last Atlantis line so you can see the difference in colors I talked about.

When it came to learning photoshop, I tried with duplicating the ocean layer here. I was trying to give different depth perspective to the diver and the temple. I believe I succeeded, but once more there's probably a better way to do perspective and I appreciate any advice. Should I for instance have duplicated the ocean floor on top of the temple, with a high transparency to give it some sort of refraction effect?

What the poor diver doesn't know is that I've hidden no more than three dangerous sea monsters inside the temple, so he should make the wise move and stay away from the treasure.

Go pick up golf balls near the local harbor instead, dude!

Happy Underwater Month.

Edited September 12, 2011 by Soulgem

[Wardancer]

I like the light house and the coral reef a lot! Very well done!

[LandShark]

Ooh, very interesting.

Although I usually prefer having brick-built backgrounds for Lego, I still think they all look great.

Good to see people getting into the spirit of Underwater Month.

[Rocketbilly]

This is really good!

I know Photoshop can be a very useful tool, but using to learn it well is a very frustrating and fiddly process, this is some nice work.

My favourite is the Creator Lighthouse picture, and the washed out colours you've put over it. Really cool.

[Soulgem]

Ooh, very interesting.

Although I usually prefer having brick-built backgrounds for Lego, I still think they all look great.

Good to see people getting into the spirit of Underwater Month.

Thanks for comments.

I actually prefer brick built too, but I just don't have the MOC skills (or maybe I'm just nervous of learning to make MOCs), and I dont have nearly enough blue bricks

I'm definitely feeling the underwater month though, as an amateur diver it inspired me to take out all my ocean related toys.

Creator lighthouse is an amazing model, but it's the image I feel worked the least. The lighthouse just sticks out too much. I have no clue how to make it work better. Learning PS is indeed a fiddly process.

[Peppermint_M]

I do like the Atlantis pictures, they look really cool and quite aquatic.

Thanks for taking some time to participate in the month