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It’s a very long time since I made Jam so I can’t show a jar of the sticky stuff for this challenge. I could show a screenshot one of my freshly painted trailers in Euro truck, after all there was a lot of head-scratching, png file manipulation, dds conversion and playing with code associated with creating those. But you’ll see them in my Trucking Digest file anyway – so they’re not for this post. However, it did occur to me that some of my images require quite a bit of work to achieve the finished article that I want to publish. Here’s one that I took during our recent holiday in Scotland……It’s one of those shots where you take it or miss it. I couldn’t zoom in as I use a 50mm fixed lens as my standard lens on the Fujifilm X-Pro2. There also wasn’t time to tweak the exposure compensation for the light either. To get the final result that I wanted to achieve was going to require a lot of post processing work.

So with a crop to remove the bits of the image I didn’t want. Then I had to manipulate the lighting balance of the photo to counter the brightness of the sky in the top right corner by introducing some light in the bottom left hand corner. I used the Lighting tool in Affinity for this, which is the first time I’ve tried that tool so it was a learning opportunity too. Then back to the traditional burn tool for the clouds and a touch of dodge tool for the man and boy. I hope you like the end result!..…I’m not totally happy because the processing has introduced some artefacts along the edges of the sign so I’ll be going back and playing with this one again 😉

So that’s my entry for Nancy’s Challenge this week. It occurred to me that the finished image would also have been a good entry for Nancy’s first challenge post – Shakespeare’s words ‘Tell me where is fancy bred, In the heart or in the head?’ could very well apply to the task of understanding our love affair with trains 🙂