How Much Image Manipulation?

I needed a larger sample for the ballast. If you were to take a good photo of your ballast type, I would have used enough random samples that you would never know it wasn't real... :teeth:

Did you notice the tower roof is fixed, the chimney is straight, and the building has left Kansas...

 

or
You might take the photo but not realize its qualty(ies). I find most of my best after the picture has been taken and cropped.

 

Do people really want to see only this type of horizontal photo of my layout? Bad photo, but not Photoshopped.

 

Oh, I noticed, Tony. I was just having trouble quoting your post, so thought I'd bail before my browser quit. But you didn't fix the railing!:teeth:

Oh man, now I realize a smiley is considered an image! Arruugghhh! That's why I had to cut down my previous post!

 

Yes. That's exactly what I want to see. A layout is a layout, a model railroad in progress, an evolving result of a person's hobby, not a fantasy world.



I give up.

 

Yes, I agree that it's good to see the reality of a layout. But it's also fun to have a peek at the modeler's fantasy world. When he or she looks at their work, I'm sure they envision it without the seams, without the garage door tracks, etc. And so, with a bit of digital trickery, we can get an idea of how they envision it. My only objection is passing it off as contest material, unless the contest explicitly accepts such material.

 

I must concur.
Looking at your un-finished image I was able to see more details as they will look on my layout. "oh, good, I feel better now" was my first reaction.

So, sure, by all means doctor up images when you fee it is best. Still, now and then post a few 'real" ones.

 

Ditto! Cristi

The picture with the garage doors showing was the only picture posted by Pete, where I was confident I was seen his work on the layout. And I liked it a lot. Like some others on this thread, I am a non-fiction, reality modeler.

2 cents, more than it's worth

 

Except for fake skies now and then, most of mine are real ones.

Chaya, don't give up! This is one of the best discussions we've had here in a long time! And your viewpoints are valid, and valued. No one is trying to win here. I'm learning a lot. Maybe I'll change my practices now that I've heard different viewpoints. It's a discussion. not a debate where somone wins.

I've been searching for one of my best non-manipulated images. Yep, it's a long horizontal shot again.

 

I guess I should try to do some before and after shots. Not before any Photoshopping, but construction shots to encourage folks that a good model railroad starts pretty humbly. Like this:



My Railimages album about the construction has about a hundred of these shots. Is anyone interested? Not from the views it's received.

These are not manipulated in the least. They are snapshots. They show what was. I wouldn't even think of taking that shot as a representative shot of my layout today. There's just no "art" or composition. It's a documentary shot only.

I wish there were a market for a series about my construction techniques, but I think we're about 30 years past that.

 

This isn't exactly the same angle, but it's as close as I could find.



Between the rough construction and this, I extended the decks by five inches to give more "foreground." Obviously, I've cropped out the third deck and I came in a bit closer.

There's a whole lot of work here in the details, and no Photoshopping. That's a photo back drop in the upper right, which I physically blended into the closer backdrop in the upper left. Yep, I just cut up a photograph of a granite cliff and pasted it on.

I think this is a good, solid image that shows what can happen to a model railroad in three years. If you don't want to make the effort, then don't complain that I'm discouraging you! I made the effort to tranform the previous snapshot into this image.

 

Just curious, how was the vegetation in the foreground made? I'm playing devil's advocate, only because I seem to detect some cloned greenery. Or did I musunderstand the intent of the caption...? Apologies in advance if I am out of line here.

 

Of course it is a fantasy world. Otherwise, we would all be running 1:1.

 

Ooops, my mistake here. At the very bottom right, in this image, there's a little cloned scenery. I took out a hotspot there, quickly, on this test shot.

Always OK to play devil's advocate. This was not the final shot, just the one that I uploaded to Railimages. I worked later to cut down on the hotspots in the greenery and on the cab windows.

I've probably destroyed all my credibility with this single image. Oh well, it's a hobby. It's an image taken three years ago, that I retook a few months ago, because I liked it. This is probably from my Railimages album.

Let me find the re-take. That's the image I wanted to show.

 

I just looked at the hi-res version. There's no cloning. I think it just appears that way in the low-res jpeg. So I'm clear on this one. I'll post a blow-up a bit later.

 

Same image, hi-res, blown up.

This is the cheapest artificial turf you can find, extensively raked over with a comb, knife, rasp, wire brush. When I bring it down from 17 Mbytes to 100 Kbytes, I know that strange things happen.

 

I had a feeling there was something digital going on. When I spotted this perfectly repeating form, I sensed a clone.



I also spied what looks like a digital smear thing going on (white circles) and two identical image sections (red circles) in the blowup:



I'm not trying to do any discrediting; it's more like a game (remember the "spot the differences" thing in the comics section of the papers? One of my favorites as a kid). As a commercial artist, I've been doing the digital thing for nearly as long as Photoshop has existed, so I tend to have an eye for most of the tricks. And, of course, I could be totally wrong.

 

Well, you got me wondering on this one. So here's exactly the same photo, uploaded with different Jpg settings: