[PlayRaw] Waiting for the Big Boy

Processing Play Raw
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Ooh, Ooh, railroading… :steam_locomotive:

I’ve been loosely following the roll-out of 4104, thought you might have a mighty image of it here, but was not surprised to see wheelsets. I’ve sat waiting for just such equipment, and turned to shoot the surroundings when things took a while to materialize. This is done with my hack software, so I’ll do a blow-by-blow like @pphoto did:

DSC_0617a
DSC_0617a2855×1913 735 KB

  • colorspace:camera,assign - I’m using dcraw and camconst.json to look up camera primaries; D3000 was in dcraw. Your camera has a spectral response that has to eventually be mapped down to whatever medium will be displayed, and these numbers, called primaries, provide the starting point specific to your camera.

  • whitebalance:camera - camera multipliers left a blue cast, more on that later I went back and changed the multipliers to suit; the camera numbers were 1.793,1.0,1.371, then numbers that actually look nice are 1.513,1.000,1.661

  • demosaic:ahd - Defauilt algorithm

  • blackwhitepoint:rgb - This scales the data to its lower and upper limits, needed to make the raw data represent black, white, and all the tones in between in the display’s terms.

  • curve:blue,0.0,0.0,40.0,33.0,255.0,255.0 - Pull the blue channel to the green one (See whitebalance, above)

  • curve:red,0.0,0.0,29.0,39.0,255.0,255.0 - Pushed the red channel to the green one (See whitebalance, above)

  • curve:rgb,0.0,0.0,19.0,15.0,35.0,54.2,255.0,255.0 - This would be the somewhat the same as ‘base curve’ or ‘filmic’ in other software, increases the contrast

  • exposure:1.10 - The curve was getting crowded at the bottom, so I just lifted the exposure a bit.

  • crop:0.171329,0.112299,0.903538,0.844508 - I get it, you probably had a decent track-side position for the 4014 fly-by, but the wheelsets would have benefited from a bit more frame-fill and possibly a less straight-on angle.

Okay the above might be a bit obtuse, but it reflects all the things needed to make your raw image a presentable photograph: starts with color conversion, white balance, demosaic, all that before you even start to work the image to your taste.

I live in Colorado; one year when we were poorer and strapped for time, our summer vacation was a set of long weekends riding every steam train in the state. Learned a lot of history, saw some beautiful scenery, and, Trains!!! Steam locomotives are my favorite photographic subject…

Welcome to the forum!!

Edit: changed the WB multipliers, eliminated the per-channel curves.