Train Tracks

As I typed the title of this post, it occurred to me that moving from the comfort of Photoshop Elements 5 to Lightroom 2.2 has been a bit like being hit by a train. You know, I was driving along, pretty happy with my post-processing skills and black/white conversions, and then BAM, I got hit by the Lightroom Express. Not in a bad way, though. LR has been a bit overwhelming for me, partly because I have endeavored to work on cataloging and organizing a few thousand photographs as part of the migration. For someone who is not particularly well organized, well, that's a bit of a chore. LR is at once complicated (because it does SO much) and easy (because it does SO much). That said, I had my PSE workflow pretty much down, knew a bunch of tricks and shortcuts, and now I'm learning something totally different. So, yeah--train wreck.

I've been reading the books I ordered to learn as much as I can. I've shot a little bit in the past couple of weeks (not much, but a little), and I've been itching to get out of LR's Library module and dig into the Develop module. Here's a picture that I've taken basically from start to finish through the Develop module. I set the white balance using the White Balance Selection tool, adjusted the Exposure and Recovery sliders, adjusted the midtone contrast with the Clarity slider and then adjusted the total contrast with the Tone Curve. The Targeted Adjustment Tool is an amazing tool for making localized adjustments, particularly with the Tone Curve (much like a Curves adjustment layer in Photoshop).

The black and white conversion is most cool. I first used the greyscale conversion (which I never used in PSE), made more adjustments to the Exposure, Blacks and Clarity sliders, and then used the Targeted Adjustment Tool tool to adjust the greyscale mix (which consists of red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple and magenta). Then I applied a duotone. Straightened, cropped, post-crop vignette, and that's it. Then, I downloaded a plug-in that exports photos directly to Flickr, so it gets exported to my Flickr page.

This was taken on the train tracks in Julie's home town of Roe, Arkansas (population 124--salute!) on December 27, 2008. I got lots of stares. That's ok. I've been wanting to take this photograph for a long time. Personally, I'm very close to liking the b/w conversion. And I'm very close to absolutely loving Lightroom.

EXIF:

Nikon D80 with 18-135mm lens at 75 mm
ISO 400
f/11
1/160 sec.


UPDATE:


Here's a couple of other shots from the same session. This one is from the left side of the tracks (I like the right side better).






This one was kinda down low with a contemporary tilt of the camera.