Railroad Romance

Railroad Romance

Rich Legg | 09/11/2007 | Unknown Location | 104mm * f/5.0 * 1/250s * ISO100
[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!

Railroad Romance Post-Processing

  1. Original JPEG
    Here's what the full-sized JPEG image straight out of the camera looked like.
  2. 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.
  3. Curves Adjustment Layer
    I brought up the contrast a little with an “S” curve to start things off.
  4. 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%.
  5. Saturation Adjustment Layer
    I reduced the saturation by bringing the level down to -35 and leaving the Hue and Lightness alone at zero.
  6. 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!