Yesterday I took a trip to the Georgia State Railroad Museum and had a great time. It made for a great trip back in time and one of the things that really caught my eye was the 1913 steam locomotive #30 made by the American Locomotive Company (ALCO). After posting this image I thought I’d share how I created it.

I found #30 in the roundhouse sitting with some other engines. I really wanted to focus on this beautiful locomotive, though, so the first thing I did was crop everything but the front of the engine out of frame. I think this gave the perfect look and focused the viewer’s eye where it needs to be.

The first step was to apply the generic B&W conversion within Lightroom. For this post I’m using Lightroom 5.6 on my Macbook Pro.

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The histogram looked pretty much perfect to me. There wasn’t any clipping on either end and I was happy with the overall tone of the image. However, I still felt it was a little too bright so I dropped the exposure about 2/3 stop.

Next I dropped the highlights and boosted the shadows with a very small increase to the blacks. I’m not really too concerned about losing a little detail since I think the image reaps the reward in the end.

The final step was to boost the clarity. This has really become my tool of choice for making B&W conversions. It really gives a great deal of detail and provides a wonderful look in my opinion. I try not to overuse it which can easily be done.

Hopefully you’ll agree that the final image is a strong one and it’ll take you back to the turn of the last century.

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While I really enjoy doing the conversions on my own, I also realize that there are some great tools out there. I’m in the process of evaluating Tonality Pro from the guys at Macphun. If you’re on the Mac platform it’s well worth investigating yourself. It provides 150 presets to get you going and you can tweak them to your heart’s content. Here’s a comparison between my manual conversion and the Grunge 1 preset in the Street category.

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