Evolution of an Old Image

By Chris | Published May 6, 2020

Yesterday, I set about the business of printing one of my most printed photos again. Welcome Back, #346! has always been one of my most popular images and has been the print that has sold the best for me. As I was printing it, though, I noticed some things that could be improved. So I made some changes before I hit the print button and a few more after the first workprint came out of the P800. As I looked through my Lightroom history, I realized this isn’t the first time that this has happened, either. Every time I printed this particular image, I did some tweaking and adjusting of it. Below are a few snapshots of some of my previous versions as well as the most recent copy that got printed:

This is the first version I ever posted online, shortly after the picture was taken in 2007. I don’t even remember what I was using to process images at the time but it was prior to Lightroom. I’m thinking this is probably a pretty straight conversion with some white balancing and light tonal adjustments.
This is the next iteration. This is circa 2011 or so. I used Lightroom to process this and it probably would have been sent to Reed Photo in Denver for printing at this time. Adobe Camera Raw has treated the tones differently than what I was using previously. Honestly, I don’t like this version very much. There are a lot of dull tones, especially in the exhausted steam coming out of the open cylinder cocks.
Next version, circa 2018. A little better on the tones of the steam but still not great and the grey tones on the smokebox door could use a little better definition, too. This version was printed by Mike’s Camera in Colorado.
And here’s what I finished with last night. I did a few global edits, used some tools in Lightroom that weren’t available last time (the Texture slider, for instance), did many more local edits than I had on previous versions (a recent processing trend for myself that I discussed in this post). The result yielded much better tones, I think. I’ve got a lot of copies of this print around but the most recent done yesterday was certainly my favorite.

I think every photographer has images like this. Ansel Adams famously was always tweaking his most popular image, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. Check out just how different three versions of Moonrise are in this article at artnet. I really would have liked to see what St. Ansel would have done in the digital era. I imagine that he’d still be tweaking Moonrise to this day with the new tools and techniques available.

This entry was posted in Photographic Philosophy, Railroad Images and tagged , , , , .

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