trainrider47 Wrote:
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> I think what Russ is trying to achieve is to
> make the photographic image look as close
> to the way he saw it as possible. Our eyes
> can handle a much wider dynamic range of
> exposure than film or even digital can. We
> can see the detail on the front of the loco
> as well as the detail in the clouds. So often
> with photography it's either/or, but not both.
Thanks for the moral support, Michael -
Actually, the painting that Jeff Ellingson created for me five years ago does an even better job of capturing the "artistic essence" of the scene. Other than a little brightening to compensate for under-exposure, I'm not trying to enhance the photo beyond what the camera captured. If that were the case I would add #315's illuminated class lamps from a photo taken at the same location forty years later in place of #498's blurry class lamp silhouettes in the earlier photo. I'm just trying to get a digital capture of what really is already on the slide - the detail that shows when it is projected. I know that capturing shadow detail from slides - especially high-contrast Kodachromes - is the Achilles Heel of scanners. Ah, if only the original were a negative!!
There is one significant problem with the "adjusted" photo in the screen capture posted earlier - a very visible fringe in the areas of greatest contrast where the top of the locomotive meets the brightest parts of the sky - as you can see in this full-size crop of that portion of the file
:
I've noticed this effect before when pushing "Brighten Shadows" too far, but this time it seems to have resulted from "Fill Light" while still in "Camera Raw" mode. It isn't the result of using the "Unsharp Mask", which I only employ just before "Save for Web" or "Print", and isn't quite as bad as the miss-matches, fringes and obvious signs of digital "dodging & burning" that I got from my attempt to merge scans of greatly different exposures, but it will require at the very least some very careful masking of the engine and cloning of the sky over the blue fringes
...
Thanks again for your encouragement!!
- Russ