Toy Photography Behind the Scenes: Here's the Plan

Here's a making of video for my newest photograph!

Din Djarin and Cobb Vanth work with the Tuskens to devise a plan.

Created using The Mandalorian, Cobb Vanth and Tusken Raider from Hasbro's The Black Series line.

Welcome back to another behind the scenes toy photography video. Today I'm going to show you how I created this photo that I've entitled "Here's the plan".

The concept of this photo was to show Din Djarin, Cobb Vanth and the Tuskens planning out their attack on the Krayt Dragon that we see in Season 2 of the Mandalorian.

For this photo I am using the following Star Wars Black Series figures: Cobb Vanth, the first canon novel character to make the transition to the big screen, an Archive Collection Tusken Raider, one of my favourite Black Series figures, and The Mandalorian, who I have made a custom soft goods cape for out of an old t-shirt.

I started the setup by spreading a bunch of sand on a concrete surface and placing this little plywood chest that I found at Michael's craft store, which I've painted grey. After that I position the figures and their accessories.

One of the best parts about using sand as a ground surface is that you can hide figure stands underneath it like so.

Next I have a few home made accessories to round out the scene. They're planning an attack, so I figure they would have devised their battle plan with a small diorama. I'm using twigs to represent various positions held by their attack group, and a lesser Krayt Dragon skull that I've moulded out of clay to represent the larger Krayt Dragon they're trying to dispose.

To give the photo a little depth, I've made a cardboard cutout of some hills that I covered in sand, behind which I place this old die cast Sandcrawler that i got back in the 90s.

Now for lighting. I have a back light which you can see in frame here as well as two overhead lights to give the scene that "high noon" feel. I'm adding a choroplast board on the side to act as a reflector and I'm using the same orange daylight gel on every light. Lastly, I turn off all the other lights in the room and turn on the TV that I am using as a background. I created the sky background from scratch in Photoshop.

Now that it's all set up, I'll give you a walk around view of the setup.

For the last part of this video, we'll cover my favourite part, the editing. As you can see, I only have the one Tusken Raider figure, but I really wanted two in the shot. My solution was to take two shots with the figure in different positions and then combine them in photoshop. I will also be doing some focus stacking, so I'm actually combining three photos in all.

My first step is to place all 3 images in one file and use the auto align tool. Now that the layers are perfectly aligned, I can create a layer mask on one of the Tusken Raider images and brush a hole in it, revealing the second Tusken Raider underneath. I also want the dragon skull to be in focus, so I'll put that image on top and use an empty layer mask to brush the skull into focus. This image had a slightly different exposure than the other two, so I'll make a levels adjustment layer underneath it to bring the other 2 images up to the same light level.

Next comes what I like to call the "detoying" process. I make a duplicate merge of my layers then use a combination of tools to remove all the articulation points from the figures to make them look more realistic. In this image I have used the spot healing brush tool, the clone stamp tool, the smudge tool, and a series of content aware fills after making selections with the lasso tool.

After detoying, I make a second duplicate merge and use the dodge tool to lighten up the figures in a few key places.

Lastly I add a few more adjustment layers. My workflow for this process is usually to start with a levels adjustment layer, followed by hue and saturation and then colour balance. Once all the
big adjustments are made, I crop the image and add a vignette. Maybe just a little more cropping. After all that, we have the final image! I hope you enjoyed this video, thanks for watching!