What version are you using right now? I've gone as far as version 12, then I actually backed down to version 9 because of stability issues. I think version 9 was probably their best so far; the rest have only been incremental updates with relatively little added value, IMO.
Version 5 from the late 90s. There's a site license issue. It was provided to me under a site license by one of my clients. He decided not to upgrade, and switched to Illustrator. So I'd probably have to buy a new license on my own, from scratch. So I chug along with a perfectly legal, but not upgraded, V5. Of course it worked fine under OS 9, for which it was built. It worked fine all the way up to OS 10.2.8. It blew up under OS 10.3, and I'd given up and reconstructed all my old layout drawings. Then it worked again under 10.4! So I brought up every drawing I had, and saved them under something any drawing program could understand. Today's software drives me nuts! And it's pertinent to this discussion. This illustration of my previous layout took a long time: I could certainly make it better until Canvas 5 started crashing!
This has been a wonderful discussion. I've drawn some conclusion for myself: 1. Don't clone in foregrounds, Use temporary layout extensions. In the long run, the extension may be less effort. 2. Don't clone in backgrounds unless absolutely unavoidable. Go to the effort to mount blue cards for the sky. Not a big deal for me, as I've done it in the past. 3. Examine your test shots for little annoyances and correct them. Usually it's just a vacuum or a little puff of air to remove them. 4. Don't expect a bigger payment for doing any of this. 5. Someone will always dislike your efforts. I learned this one 40 years ago, when I published an article on kites in Seventeen magazine. Someone objected that I photographed a Dracula kite. Nothing wrong with a Chinese dragon kite, or Japanese fighting kites, just the portrayal of a flying vampire. Figure that one out? I try for a balance in my train room images. I have backdrops but, due to vertical limitations, I sometimes don't have enough sky.
Getting accurate results without manipulation I've kinda, sorta mastered how to take 640 pixel wide crops out of the original 3008 x 2000 pixel images. This should be an accurate representation of my modeling, pixel by pixel, literally. The highlights blew out in the conversion from Tiff to jpeg, but that's nearly unavoidable. I still hate the little white spots! It's not dust--it's just the camera interpolating the neighboring pixels. And these ships haven't been weathered a whit
That's odd. The only time I see white spots like that is when either there really is dust there, or there are tiny reflections from surface imperfections under bright lighting. When it's dust, I break out the pressurized air, and 90% of it goes away (the rest I touch out); when it's reflections, I work on getting the lighting angle better. Sometimes I discover that the reflections are due to areas that are very slightly glossy, and a misting of Dullcote usually fixes it. In any case, here's a 640-pixel 1:1 crop from a completely unaltered 3504 x 2336 original: And here is the full frame: This by the way was taken with the cheap zoom that came with the camera body; also, it was taken before I learned that the factory default sharpness setting on the imager was "portrait" mode, which is too soft to correct after the fact in software. I've since reset the imager to a sharper setting and am using a better lens, with much improved results.
Dave, I'm having trouble in Photoshop making a 1:1 crop at exactly 640 pixels wide. Is there some setting I should know? I don't know how to get the crop tool to tell me what the exact size is! I haven't "poured the water" on this scene yet, so white spots could be anything that you mentioned. Dull-coat does work. It just doesn't agree with me. My train room is essentially sealed, except for the door and the HVAC unit. I have a big fan to evacuate the air through the open door, but it takes a long while. I'm just hyper-sensitive to fumes, due to over-exposure when I was a teenager, and as a summer worker in an industrial plant in college.
Ok, the white spots that are bothering me, which are only the ones near the piling footings at the top of the "water", are reflections from the rope lights above, or dust. I thought the reflections should be yellower, but this was a long exposure. The other white spots, such as on the cabin windows, or on the tug's features, don't bother me at all. I'm rather fascinated by how the cabin windows turned out. And how most of the portholes have white rings around them--I like the effect, but they are just holes in styrene in reality.
I don't use Photoshop, so you may need to pose your question on a Photoshop message board. However, in Corel Photopaint, I can turn on an "Image Info" docker which displays the cursor location (absolute and relative X and Y coordinates), pixel color (in any format--RGB, CMYK, Hex, etc.), size of the currently selected object or mask, and other properties. So, I choose the cropping tool, click where I want to start the crop, and drag until the size indicator says 640 by whatever I want. Chop chop.
Those white rings look to me like artifacts from either overexposure or over-sharpening. Or maybe a little of both. You can see similar artifacts elsewhere, such as along the shadow under the horizontal light blue pole in the upper left corner of the image, and the thin black halo around the white objects on the top of the foreground boat. Overexposure would also explain why otherwise nearly invisible white specks would bloom out and get larger, making things look dustier than thay are.
You didn't say which version of Photoshop, but CS allows you to type in the dimension of the final crop you want and then you draw your crop window on the image. So matter what you crop, your final image will be the size (and resolution) you specified. Works nice. Jason
For a look at the fun side of image manipulation, check out this utterly hysterical thread at the Railwire... http://therailwire.net/smf/index.php?topic=13296.0
Photo manipulation in this weekend’s “documentation” of the dismantling of my old East Texas piney woods layout. I shot in afternoon and a glare in upper left corner from sunlight through gauzy curtained windowed would have blown out the entire picture. I manipulated image by placing piece of cardboard clothespinned to valance curtain rod, just out of sight at top of picture. Still quite a bit of light came through right side of window which I needed to mask. A gray pair of pants over the curtain rod manipulated the image sufficiently. Normal room light only hit foreground, so I supplemented with a little photo flood in the back distance, just off camera to the right. Also, the cord to the ceiling fan hung down into the picture, so I manipulated it out of the way. (I hate having to deal with ceiling fan in lighting train room!!!) Of course, a lot of stuff got put away JUST BEFORE I set up for picture. After I put away structures, I had boxes on the layout sorting out little things-- vehicles, figures, signs, removable details. Those got hidden on the “back” side of the layout, just behind the viewblock tree line. Image manipulation. And I don’t show the floor which looks awful, cluttered with all the boxes I have saved to store stuff which turn out to be either too big or too small or too much the wrong proportion. I nearly ALWAYS crop image in Photoshop, not so much to hide anything as to eliminate unnecessary parts of image that take up net bandwidth, download time for dialup folks. (I have had highspeed myself only 2 months.) By the way, I shoot model and layout images for net with broadcast digital video camera, import video clip to computer, load to Adobe Premiere which allows exporting a portion of video as stillframe .bmp file, load to Photoshop to crop, balance color & level if necessary, and convert to .jpg for uploading to railimages. Roundabout but it’s what I have.
I've already commented about how great I think this photo is. Reading your note, I does not seem to me that you manipulated the photo, but managed the light conditions to ensure your photograph more closely matched what the eye sees. To me, manipulation would be the addition of items such as backdrops, scenery items etc. making the photograph represent what you want it to look like, not what it does. I still love this picture and hope you can post a picture of the layout the way it was before demolition. Joe
