Foden Traction Engine

Foden Traction Engine, Kent County Show, Detling, Maidstone, England

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Foden Traction Engine

Like the image of Château de Chenonceau in the last post, this is another shot captured when I was living in England. This image, though, dates back even further than the transparency of Chenonceau. This shot of a Foden Traction Engine was made at the Kent County Show at Detling near Maidstone in the summer of 1990. The scan came from a color negative and was very faded to say the least. Lightroom was able to recover some of the saturation and even remove the color cast but I was not happy with the overall result. As I was very pleased with what I had been able to achieve with the latest version of new On-One Software Perfect Effects 9 Software with the image of Chenonceau, I decided to give it a try on this old beauty.

No matter what I did, the soft nature of the scan together with some unusual color combinations – mildly turquoise sky instead of blue and the faded yellow straw color of the dead grass – meant this was not an image to finish in glorious technicolor. Plus, the main subject of the shot cried out for a more vintage look to the final image. I first took the image from Lightroom into Photoshop so that I had complete control of the blending of the layers (For those of you who are not familiar with Photoshop Layers this is my favorite reference. It may not be the newest but it is still the best).

Once in Photoshop, I passed the image through Perfect Effects to fade the colors and create a basic vintage look. Once the image was back in Photoshop, the image was then sent back to the OnOne software package, this time to their B&W 9 Suite when a low contrast sepia toned black and white image was created. Once the effects were applied and the image returned to Photoshop the opacity of the layer of this B&W version was reduced so that some of the color from the underlying layer showed through. A merged copy of the resulting layer was then taken back to Perfect Effects 9 to apply a faded vignette, some mild texture (scratched metal at a very low opacity) and then the torn paper border creating the final image you see here.