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The Plasticville Railroad Center

THE PLASTICVILLE RAILROAD CENTER

    This picture was derived from four scans of the Plasticville Railroad Center Master Unit box cover courtesy of Sheldon Wotring. Thanks Sheldon!

    After mating up the four scans, none of the four individual pictures lined up perfectly. So I matched them correctly in the more difficult areas to "re-paint," like the track. Then after correcting the hue, color balance, brightness and contrast on all of the layers so that the seams would not be as noticeable they were merged into one picture.

    Most of the time was spent getting rid of the dirt and replacing the missing sections of the picture. This is especially apparent in the lower left hand corner where I replaced all of the left side panels on the roof of the box car. This was done by adapting the right side panel pixels to this side of the box car and decreasing the brightness because the light source is to the right.

    All of the writing was then eliminated from this painting. This was a rather tedious chore due to the fact of where it was located. I had to preserve the "shading" at the top in the sky. And at the bottom the writing went right over the grilled roof walk, and the brake wheel on the box car.

    560 lines of pixels had to be eliminated from the top of the picture to bring it into the proper proportions for the desktop. But I didn’t want to eliminate the shading that was towards the top of the blue sky on the original box.

    I moved the top of the sky to a separate picture and saved it. Then I selectively pulled pixels from this picture and inserted them in the one that I was working on, being careful to go around the top of the Water Tank.

    When this was done, these additional lines of pixels were blended into the picture to provide an almost seamless transition of colors from light blue near the horizon to sky blue at the top.

    Lastly, I took a portion of the graphic that is used as the "core" file for the semaphore on the Green Light Award, sized it to fit, and inserted it in the block signal that is in the background. This caused this green light to show up much more than what was on the original picture.

    After the picture was sized properly it was then "sharpened," and the "hue" and "saturation" levels were adjusted in the "Color Curves" to Input: 126; Output: 106 in Photoshop. The brightness was then increased to "+14" to create the final finished version.

    I hope that I haven’t taken too many liberties in this digital adaptation of the original artwork. This is just an awesome picture and I feel that it is the consummate work by this artist. Does anyone know who drew these pictures for Bachmann? What ever Bachmann paid this artist for this work - it wasn’t enough! Smile

    I hope you enjoy this picture.

Charles

Home Happy Plasticville Railroading
Graphics and page design by Charles Wilber

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