Railroad Romance
By Brian Auer • January 17th, 2008
[See it at LeggNet's Digital Capture] [See it at Flickr]
This week’s photoblog is a special edition. The photo isn’t mine, but it’s one that I processed. Rich Legg ran a small project by calling photoshoppers out to process one of his untouched photos. I barely squeaked my way in by being the fifth one to contact him. I won’t go into all of the details on why I processed this image the way I did, because I’ve already done so on the project results page over at Rich’s blog — so go definitely check it out!
- Original JPEG
Here’s what the full-sized JPEG image straight out of the camera looked like. - Processed RAW
I didn’t do much processing in ACR on this one. Auto Exposure settings with slight adjustments. And I cropped it way down (for reasons mentioned on Rich’s blog). I also cloned out the rock in the bottom right corner. - Curves Adjustment Layer
I brought up the contrast a little with an “S” curve to start things off. - Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer
I ran the channel mixer with 34% red, 66% green, and the output set to Monochrome. This made a black and white image, but I then set the blend mode to Overlay and reduced the opacity to 80%. - Saturation Adjustment Layer
I reduced the saturation by bringing the level down to -35 and leaving the Hue and Lightness alone at zero. - Photo Filter Adjustment Layer
I used an LBA Warming Filter set at 35% density to warm up the image. I should have reduced this value for web output because the web browsers tend to show things slightly oversaturated, but this is how I sent the file back to Rich.
Enjoy!
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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Nice job, Brian! I really like your reinterpretation of the photo. Very nice and timeless photo.
Thanks Trevor, just what I was going for!
i like that kind of tones, good job .i´m trying to find a soft looking for some photos and this is a star.
thanks Brian
Very much identifiable as your style. Certainly there are elements of the photo I would comment on if it were your photo, but the processing is spot on. It definitely fits the photo.
Thanks man! It’s good to hear that I have a “style”, nonetheless one that can be identified!
Of the contestants you cropped the most extreme and it turned out excellent. The look of those jeans is absolutely the way it should be, timeless!
Wow, fantastic processing work. And very nice step-by-step you provided. I’m always looking for new Photoshop techniques and different approaches to things. Thanks!
from a normal photo to something that catches attention for a moment or two ! Thanks for sharing
I’ve just seen all four participants’ results on Rich’s blog.
I know that it is rather subjective but for me your version was the most creative, telling and attractive.
Congratulations and thanks for sharing the workflow.
^^I’m in total agreement! Even the subjective bit
The results are amazing - and this is a smart idea.