Author: Ron

NECA Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Using Photoshop Levels to Enhance Dramatic Lighting

As much as I love what Playmates is doing with their Nickolodeon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lines (stay tuned for some quick pics from Talyn coming up tomorrow), I have a special place in my collection for the NECA TMNT figures from a few years back. I had a picture of my TMNT setup from back when I added tap lights to my display cubes, but that picture was from before I had April.

Since then, the shelf and figures had gotten pretty dusty, so I took the opportunity to clean them up and take a new picture. In this article, I’ll also show you what I did in Photoshop with the Levels tool to enhance the lighting effects for this particular shot.

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Hot Toys Avengers Hulk is Always Angry

We got our first full look at the upcoming Hot Toys Hulk at Ani-Com, and with the official release pics I continue to be impressed. Some folks in the 1/6 community are a little jarred by the visible articulation points – but I figure this is a big green mostly naked guy, so there isn’t a lot of opportunity to hide those joints. Hot Toys did implement a “seamless” articulated elbow, but that raises the concern of possible rips in the “skin” and hindrances to posing.

One surprise – does “rolling eyeballs” mean full PERS or just some side to side action? Either way, Hulk likey! I mean SMASH!

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Play Imaginative Super Alloy Batman – the 1/6 Batman You’ve Been Waiting For?

Hot Toys may have the 1/6 scale locked up when it comes to the Nolan-verse Dark Knight, but what about those of us looking for some comics-based Batman in this scale? Enter Play Imaginative, which is offering  just that – a 1/6 scale Batman featuring the New 52 Jim Lee design. The catch? As of now, this is an exclusive that is only available via pre-order and on the show floor of the upcoming Singapore Toy, Games & Comic Convention 2012, running the 1st and 2nd of September.

With 50 points of all the right kinds of articulation, a die-cast metal body, bat-accessories that can be gripped in fully-articulated hands and fingers, and a gargoyle base, this could be the start of something really special for Play Imaginative’s DC license (of which I’d really like more details). At 350 Singapore dollars (roughly $280 USD), this will be tempting.

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Art Asylum Star Trek – with Cheap DIY Light Reflector

Star Trek 1.jpg

Art Asylum’s Star Trek figures for the original series are still a stand out in my collection. I love how they customized each figure for the character’s physical attributes – Spock is taller than Kirk, who is taller than Sulu. Today, we’d probably just get one single body reused over and over. The head sculpts are spot on too – Shatner’s is probably the toughest to capture, and I think they did a great job with it.

I’ve wanted to take some shots of these guys for a while now, and this also became an opportunity to test out a quick and cheap light reflector I whipped up a while back. It hadn’t really done anything for my indoor shots, as I often have plenty of light available with my “studio” set up. So I took a little away team to the surface of planet RBY (Ron’s back yard) to see what the reflector could do with natural sunlight.

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