With the increasing popularity of Star Wars from the latest batch of movies coming soon and last year's release of "The Force Awakens," Star Wars cosplay has become very popular once again. Unfortunately for us fans, as cool as they look in movies, lightsabers are not real. Even the very well made props that light up still do not look that realistic in photos.
To help you turn that prop into a realistic glowing lightsaber, Mathieu Stern shows us his full editing process in this speed edit video on how he adds the effects. Maybe I shouldn't say realistic since they are not real, but instead the movie special effects from the lightsabers that we are used to. Stern uses a few different tools for the image starting out in Lightroom for some tweaking followed by jumping into Photoshop for the effects. Once most of the glow is done, he then proceeds to use Color Effects Pro 4 to enhance the color and pop the contrast a bit. Color Effects is part of the NIk collection from Google, which is now free if you don't already have it. Don’t forget the details either, Stern even goes through the process adding the cast light from the saber and the reflection in the cosplayer’s eyes.
What do you think of his process? Any tips you may have learned while adding similar effects to your work? Share with us your glowing lightsaber work in the comments below!
Linear Dodge works very well for exactly this purpose. There is however a problem with this approach. It only changes the local light intensity and color. The light direction however obviously changes too - or rather, a new light source with a different light direction is added. But in order to achieve this, a real extra light source is needed, which quickly makes the shoot a technical challenge where the model can't move anymore because the light setup nails her to a spot.
How'd I do on mine Alex?
http://jpiccari.wix.com/jpiccariphoto/darth-olympius
Looks great!
Another method I've been using lately for these is to import into After Effects and use Andrew Kramer's free plugin Saber. Really speeds up the process especially if you're doing many poses or want to add other distortion effects.
Nice, I will have to check that out