The Process

This photo was taken outdoors in the driveway at sunset.  We had a lot of smoke from forest fires at the time so the sunsets were extra yellow.  I had to take the pictures for stacking very quickly as at sunset the shadows move pretty quickly.

The stack consists of 15 exposures on a Canon 70D with a Canon 70-200 lens @150 mm, ISO was 100. No colour corrections were made.

The photos were aligned and stacked in Photoshop. I leveled the image to remove the cant that module was on and cropped the image.

So far so good.  Pity about the bricks in the background.  Finding an image online to put there was going to be hard. Then I noticed that the trees on the right side of the full picture.   Hmm, I wonder if I could transplant them as they are lit the same as the model. I masked out the background to create a transparent area for my cunning plan.

Next I selected some trees and copied and pasted on to a new layer.  Some work was done with the cloning tools to fill them out as well.

Next to hide the fact that I have no window on the nose door. I copied a portion of the windshield with the reflection of the trees so it would match the other glass.  This is made of 2 layers; one is the copy of the windshield, the other on top of it is a “colour burn” layer (darkens it up).

Next headlights were added. One layer is the flare created with a custom brush, the center of the lights are created with a bush as well. 

At this point, the photo is essentially finished.  The remaining steps are to flatten the layers and duplicate the resulting layer to a new file.  The new file is resized and output sharpening is performed.  Finally the image is exported as a JPEG for the web.

Andrew

ok...

I won't go so far as to say that you cheated, rather I'll compliment you on your creative photography skills!

BRILLIANT WORK!
Well done and thank you for sharing the process Andrew!

(Clarification: the word "cheating" was used tongue in cheek)

GREAT Photo - Had me believing . . .

I would never think of your effort as cheating, but rather clever. I was ready to believe that if your train was not a real one, at least it was a "G" scale outside layout. You are about ready for Hollywood and movie making.

Thanks

Thanks for the explanation. Natural light seems to give really good results.

Awesome picture!

And thank you for the crash course in photo editing!

Chris

A plan so cunning.......

.....You could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel!

VERY nice work, I remember trying to do stuff like this with my HO models in my parents garden when I was 13 with only a Pentax camera and no Photoshop to help me!

Pretty slick

I figured there was some photoshopping involved, but not to that extent. I like what you got there, I see similar scenes in Pennsylvania. The out door photography really adds the shadows and makes for realism.

???

I thought that was a real photo! Amazing work!