There are defining times in life and also in hobbies. My wife made the mistake of asking me to put trains under the Christmas Tree 25 years ago- and it has turned into a great lifetime hobby. That moment defined some of my free time.

When I was a wee kid, my brother had trains and I had road race cars. I still recall him placing track together in our dining room under the table and seeing a UP loco running with the lights out- headlight coming down the track. That was a ground zero defining moment for me.

Fast forward 42 years or more. I thought that I would commemorate that exact same locomotive with a photo. This is my brother’s UP loco that forged those memories long ago. Still runs too!

In the post below this one, I have shown a photograph that was modified to resemble an antique photograph. The look I was going for was an old glass plate photo. As promised here are the steps to achieving this look in PhotoShop:

-First, open your photo.

-Using the Sharpen tool, adjust the strength to 50% and sharpen most of the photo. Older pictures are usually very sharp. You can make a second pass over the item of interest in the picture

-Image – Mode – Grayscale (turn the picture into a grayscale image). You will discard the color information

-Image – Mode – Duotone. Chose a second color of PMS7403C and click OK

-Image – Image Size- set to 1024×768 at 72dpi for screen display and 300dpi for print

-Layer- New … add another layer to the image

At this point you should have a texture image. You can find many of them online at photo sites such as Flickr and PhotoBucket. Since you are not using the image for anything other than a texture, I usually grab what I need. If it is specificially watermarked or copyrighted, do not use it. If you are going to place your final image for sale, I would not use it either.

Resize your texture image to match the picture you are working on.

-Using the Rectangle Marquee tool, highlight the entire texture picture

-Go back to your original image, and making sure your new layer is highlighted, paste the entire new texture image into the new layer. Set the opacity for that layer at 40%.

-Click on the Background image. You will need to adjust the brightness and contrast of it by clicking on:

-Image – Adjustments- Brightness / Contrast. Set Brightness at +10 and Contrast to +20

-Select the Dodge tool. Set brush to 200px and exposure to 50%. Lighten the edges of the picture to represent a faded picture.

-Since you cannot save as a .jpg at this point, click on “Save for the Web”.

This should give you a great antique – looking picture. I added text as another layer to look like the picture was annotated by the photographer. Another version of this photo as a tri-tone can be seen in a post somewhere below this one.

Enjoy.

I have a love for history and old photographs. There are a number of old glass plate photos that I have of relevant items family related- with genealogy being another side hobby. These photos document things as they were and were accurate depictions of a day gone by.

To relive those days in a current day and time photographically is not easy- and I have figured out a way to do it via PhotoShop. Additionally since I use photographs on my layout to enhance modeling techniques, having some old photos around gives me the fodder to get ideas and content where I can.

First- here is a glass plate photo from 1913 of my great grandfather’s saloon in East Baltimore:

In the following picture I utilized his window onto my building, named the building the same with some of the same details (GBS Brewery, etc.). From there I shot the building and worked it over in PhotoShop a little and here is the result:

As I document HOW this was done step by step, you will see the results on this page. It will take a day or so with other commitments going on, but in the next day or two I’ll write out the steps.

For your viewing pleasure, here is another shot that I turned into the glass plate photo look:

I know that there are people that would say that the use of a photograph would constitute cutting corners or failing to model properly. Sometimes to get a desired effect, a picture can speak louder than a model and with details a model cannot render.

Case in point: one of my structures is a rolling mill which I decided to model in relief. It is 4″ deep and about 4 feet long built of Komatex- a sheet PVC product in 3mm thickness. Easy to use. I weathered the structure, added windows and roof details (more on this to come) and placed the structure on the railroad. With the long walls, I felt that I needed an attention getter to distract from 4 feet of long and boring wall. Uwe Niggemeier is a professional photographer that owns and operates http://stahlseite.de/ which is a site dedicated to documenting heavy industry. With his permission I used a photograph as a model and the result is here:

Now I can get a feeling of action / activity and heavy industry. The roll up door is the same- another picture. Since it is a background feature, close detail is not as important- just the overall look and feel.

This is not the only photo I have used- there are TONS of small unobtrusive pictures everywhere on my layout. For example I needed window fronts for my structures, and while I am no where near finished, several of my buildings have photographic accents to complete them:

You get the feel of a sub shop / deli restaurant with its “open” sign hanging in the window. Even the Diet Rite sign is a local Baltimore sign that has found its way onto the layout. I’d be interested in hearing of your use of pictures.

I wanted to impart a feeling of history for my railroad and one way to do that is to backdate a few things. Pictures are one of the best ways to do this.

Playing around in PhotoShop I created a duotone picture from a color snap on my Fuji FinePixZ. After eliminating the color information, I used a light beige as the second color. Some unsharp mask and dodging / burning on the subjects game me the look I was after.

From there, I added notation to the picture. In the early part of the last century, photographers were not shy in adding notes to a picture- often in white ink.

Here is my result…

The hot metal car is an old Roundhouse ore car that I revamped into something else I wanted. I am a hopeless scrounge modeler- the hot metal ladle is a cap from the Spanish language Vicks Casero (Syrup)- cough medicine. I punched rivets into the band around the ladle with dress maker’s pounce wheel. The trucks are still the old talgo types and the wheels are the old deep flange- I will change them over to semi-scale wheels as I have been upgrading my entire fleet.

Feedback? joppaironworks @ yahoo . com