It's just a freight train coming your way

[isfppoet]

Hiya. First of all, this image is very heavily edited (at least by my limited standards) in Lightroom. *edit* The original is now on my Flickr page as well.

1. I attempted to restore the blown out/white sky via burning, but I overdid it in the final version, I think. I have another version with a brighter sky that I probably should have used!
2. I also burned the sides of the train a bit, although the front of the engine was okay.
3. I also attempted to restore some lost red color to the engines in the front of the train (there are 3 total, 2 facing backward as usual) via simply applying a red brush sampled from the train's front.

My first question is, does this photo look appealing, generally speaking, the way it is? Does it look too overprocessed? I realize the sky is way too dark; I was going for an evening dim and/or overcast look, since it was necessary to darken the sky to restore some semblance of detail. The way it turned out looks more like overcast with stormclouds at best, or just a badly processed blue sky at worst.

Next, how bad/obvious is the haloing effect around the edges of the train/horizon? It's definitely there, but I'm not sure it really shows up TOO badly unless you know to look for it.

Does the red color on the sides of the 3 engines look natural? The red on the front face of the engine in front is unaltered, for reference. I think in applying the red, I should have perhaps avoided painting over the yellow lettering on the sides, but it almost isn't noticeable to me. Does the yellow lettering look too pink/red to you?

Also, how's my composition? Frankly, this is the only one that turned out halfway decently focus-wise since I forgot to switch to autofocus (which might have failed anyway), but I like it fairly well. I wanted one with the train slightly further to the left/back, but this is what I had to work with.

Any other comments/thoughts would be appreciated as well. I'm still learning Lightroom, and my Photoshop skills in general have never been more than basic. Any ideas on how to better approach my alterations with something other than the paintbrush would be helpful too!

Whew. If that's TL;DR for you, just throw random observations/tips at me.

Camera: Nikon D3000
Exposure: 0.003 sec (1/400)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 55 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: No Flash

[Sterling]

I noticed the halo right away on the front of the engine at the far right of the shot. But that's not a huge deal. I also thought something was odd about the red coloring before reading your explanation. I think the problem is that the red color is the same brightness whether it's right at the front or if it's on the third engine back. One of the cues for distance perspective is that colors tend to become less saturated as the get farther away. By adding this extra color to the back engine, you sort of short circuit the brain's ability to gauge the distance involved. Everything except the engines looks very desaturated and almost monochrome and the bright red engine sides just don't match the surroundings (which is fine if you were going for a selective color sort of look).

Rather than artificailly painting the engines, I think I'd increase saturation globally across the entire picture to maintain the relative differences between the bright close colors and the duller distant colors.

[isfppoet]

Hmmm...okay thanks, hehe.

Yeah, the color was almost completely lost due to glare/reflection due to the angle of the sun and the angle of the train's sides, so I might try going back and not overdoing it this time and see what it does.

Everything else sort of WAS kind of monochrome, just because it's a dull scene, but I definitely noticed that too, haha. I might try toning everything down a little and just see what it looks like.

[isfppoet]

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2542/...50f0c270_o.jpg

For reference, that's the original photo. It really didn't look BAD to me, but I think I got a little carried away on the editing, haha. First time I've ever tried anything that elaborate though, so I think really it was just kind of a Frankenstein-monster kind of situation. I got ahead of myself.

At any rate, it was fun, haha. Thanks for the input.

*edit* I tried something a lot simpler along the lines of what you said, Sterling. It came out looking much better, and closer to what I intended in the first place, thanks again.

I started over from scratch, and just upped the global saturation instead of trying to do it selectively. And increased the contrast and used Lightroom's "recovery" setting to smooth out the brightness level. Took about 5 minutes, lol. Sometimes simpler is better, eh?

[dave.turley]

Hi,
Had a little go at your picture (more for practice than anything)
Imported a new sky and played with saturation.
Dave