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An Abandoned American Steam Train – Bringing the past to life with Photoshop
During a USA road trip in the late spring of 2018, we happened upon a beautiful steam locomotive (take a look at the travel blog with behind the scenes photos from this awesome adventure). It was our last day in this area, and while chatting to a friend on Instagram he mentioned this was nearby our motel (thanks Andrew :D).
The steam locomotive was within a car impound yard. After negotiating with a gentleman behind the fence, we were given permission to enter. We had only a few minutes, as he informed us he was leaving shortly and we needed to be fast. We swiftly ran around snapping shots, running around the train and scrambling up the stairs to get some shots of the cab.
I have always been a fan of Wild West movies, and I decided it might be a fun experiment to digitally alter one of the train photographs. The idea was to create a sepia-toned sunset image of the train running at full steam, to recreate a scene that would have felt at home in the Wild West.
I loaded up the image, sourced some simple freeware Photoshop brushes and set myself a time limit of one hour.
How I brought this steam train back to life
Time Taken : 1 hour
My improvised technique was relatively simple:
- Sky swap
- I selected a sepia sunset image. I used a free-use-no-attribution-required stock image.
- Clean up
- Remove distractions from the surroundings.
- First-pass colour corrections
- To get the sepia-toned mood right for the scene I have in mind.
- Fix shadows and highlights
- Burn/dodge shadows and highlights to match a light source to the right of the image, where the sun is setting.
- Steam effect
- This was added using various layers and smoke brushes.
- Global lighting fixes
- Final lighting fixes; orange-yellow gradient across sky, burning shadows below train and burn/dodges shadows/highlights onto the rest of the train. Another yellow colour cast to the sunny side highlights.
Comparison – from abandoned, to full-steam ahead!
Video illustrating this progressive transformation
I made a little video showing the progress from original, to final edit.
What do you think?
What photograph caught your eye the most? How did this location make you feel? Do you have a question? Let me know by leaving a comment!
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Excellent subject and thoroughly enjoyed watching the Photoshop process. Very well done – very well!
Thanks Roger :). I hope to do more of this kind of thing, it certainly is very enjoyable. Nice to learn some new tricks, your car artwork is so awesome and definitely something I would like to aspire to. I might try something with a Citroen DS-21, as they are my favourite older car 🙂