My Kind of Heavy Metal

As the second post here, I want to give a short look at the kinds of things I like to do to my images in post production. I've been working with Photoshop for many years now, and I will be the first to admit that compared to what I do know, there's far, far more that I don't know about it. But I do have some sweet tricks up my sleeve. Which I plan to share in a series of informative posts in the future.

For now, check out this cool image of the metra train that I took while waiting on the platform with my girlfriend:



I think that looks pretty good; the locomotive is well lit, you can see the cars behind it nicely, the crossing signal is a welcome element in the frame, the sky is a nice blue, etc. However there are a number of elements I wish were different about it. #1 I'm a big fan of so called "dutch angles" where the framing is done at a diagonal angle, adding a sense of motion or drama to the scene. I would have liked to spend more time coming up with a cool framing for the locomotive, however when it's rushing at you, there's just not time for it. So I rotated the image 20 degrees or so to the left, cropped it and did my usual photo enhancements of vibrance, curves & selective color. Next I used feathered selections to crank up the blue in the sky without affecting the locomotive color, converted the whole thing to lab color and did an unsharp mask (this is an awesome trick I'll dish on later), converted back to RGB and created a vignette that's black on the bottom half and blue on the top half, and reduced the opacity of that to about 10% so it adds only a very subtle effect. I also cloned out the lettering on the building next to the crossing signal. I think the resulting image makes the train look a lot more imposing and badass, which was the goal. Stay tuned for finer details on post processing in photoshop.