Catching up but first, an observation.

I have some catching up to do which I guess will be a reoccurring problem when I'm away for the weekend after a day of shooting. The next three posts will be:

- a morning at the Raritan Bay bridge in Perth Amboy
- the chase of the ex-NS C39-8s on the New Hope & Ivyland
- this weekend's Lerro Productions charter at Strasburg and EBT

Before I get to those though I want to share an observation about photo editing (let's get away from trip reports for a second). While going through the 1979 photos I took this weekend, I came across one that I remembered really liking when I had taken it so I opened it up in Photoshop. I remember looking at the partial back-lighting and tones in the scene and thinking that this was an easy candidate for a black and white conversion. I went through my normal process and normal techniques to get the look I wanted (below).

 

Curiosity got the best of me and I wanted to see just how different Adobe's preset "Black & White" setting would be so I went back to the original photo, re-sized it and selected their option (below). Wow. What a [terrible] difference! I'm so glad I spent a few hours reading up on the different ways to convert to black and white a couple of years ago. I know a lot of people that settle on what a program automatically does for them and its amazing how much they are missing out on by not knowing how to use the tools available which are actually quite easy.

All I know is a few PS tutorials will definitely be in the future here.