Abracadabra

I have been busy doing many other things and have really not had much time to spend in Photoshop being creative or revisit old skills and work on some new ones. The image below is the final image and was a photo of a train at the railroad museum in Wichita KS that I took last fall.

Ok, its a train. The object of the exercise was to do something with it in Photoshop. The fact that the front of the train looked so bad because the forward door was open and had no intension to be closed. The day was a dreary cold day and the sky was grey and ugly. Here is what I started with.

A number of things had to be done to recreate the door in the closed position. Colors and shades for the different angles, copy and flip the lights, rebuild the flat on the door, lettering, and ultimately the rail and chain shadows had to be put in. Here is a close up of the before and after.

In all, the tools used to recreate this were the Pen tool for vector selections, Lasso, Polygonal Lasso, Clone Stamp, Free Transform, Brush, Eraser, Gradient, Line, and maximum use of layers. I did use some really cool clouds brushes to create the sky background. It is interesting how when working with an image you can get myopic in your work. Trying to get every pixel just right when no one is really going to see the difference. It is this attention to detail that not only causes late night work, stiff muscles from sitting in one position too long, and produces really good images.

I started out this post with the intention of providing a review of one of the onOne products and will pass on that but here is the image.

It is the FocalPoint 2 Photoshop Plug-In form onOne that created the blurring effect. Yes I have a Lensbaby but when you don't have all your gear with you, the software is a nice tool. Here is a close-up of how the Plug-In works.

I is similar to the U-Point technology that Nik Software pioneered a couple of years ago. The four white dot handles control the shape of the effect, The left open circle handle controls the vignette of the blur and the right one controls the intensity of the blur. Very quick for a down- and dirty tool.

Ok, that is probably enough of the train picture. I'll Cya tomorrow... Doug


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