Im always hesitate to post anything as I will only confirm my ignorance to the general public. BUT… I model early 1920-40s steam and always am impressed with the black and white photos people post of their steam period layouts as they really enhance the period look to the layout. Made me wonder if anyone had ever considered actually building a black/white/grey layout for the same reason?
Okay, I’ll rise to the bait. [:-^] Why go to the trouble of trying to get the proper shades of black/grey/white when any digital camera can do that task for you? You can also “age” the photos, or alter them to look like hand-tinted photos that were once popular.
Wayne
Somebody did that once, an entire layout in greyscale. Don’t recall where I saw it, I think it was in N scale.
Hey! I was going to say that about the photos. Oh well, perhaps railroad minds think alike.
Actually I do have a small greyscale part of my layout. It’s a hard to see area under an elevated parking lot. Zombies are coming up out of a cave and soldiers are shooting at them. Everything painted with black and grey and only a little light gets down there.
minor nit-pick…
you mean “or alter them to look like sepia-tinted photos that were once popular”
“hand-tinting” was the process of painting colors onto a B&W photo, to make it appear like a color image…not just one overall color tone like a sepia-tone print…it was popular on old postcards and such…used a lot before color photography was invented…looks like this:
It is possible to “digitally hand-tint” B&W photos…but its a LOT of work! I have spent hours on these:
all three are originally B&W photos, no actual color versions existed…I digitally colorized them with photoshop…the last one isnt finished and looks quite “fake”…there are lots of areas that have solid color blocks…but im quite happy with the first two…
Scot
I once visited a layout that was entirely black–black scenery; black structures; black roadbed; black locomotives; black rolling stock; black everything. It took five minutes for the owner to find the circuit breaker box and turn the lights back on!
Actually, I did mean “hand tinted”, although I can’t find any of my examples. I’ve always considered sepia-tone pictures to be just another form of b&w. While not actually replicating hand-tinting, altering the colour balance of a photo can give a reasonable facsimile of the washed-out and shifted colours often observed in hand-tinted photos. The sepia-tone pictures shown above were colour photos changed to b&w, then tinted with red and yellow, as I don’t have a “sepia” option.
Here’s a (poor) example, as it was shifted too far towards yellow to illustrate another thread, but the principle is the same:
Wayne
I do recall someone posting some pics of a “black and white” layout, not sure if it was here or maybe the Atlas Forum??
Anyway, interesting idea from an artistic perspective, but I don’t think it would work on an entire layout (although as a diorama it might.) The world wasn’t black and white afterall. Think about all those bright billboard reefers of the teens-twenties. If it’s available in your area, watch a couple episodes of Fox Sport’s “Baseball’s Golden Age” featuring color home movies of baseball from the 1930’s to 1960’s. In some respects like advertising signs and such that era was more colorful than ours!!
This same question arose on this or the Atlas forum several years ago and I don’t recall anyone coming forward then to indicate they had done so, or even that they’d ever seen such a layout. On that occasion I pointed out that realistically rendering an entire layout in B&W would be exceedingly difficult job, surely requiring the eye of an accomplished artist. Getting a correct greyscale tone for each and every object on the layout would prove a Herculian task indeed and I would expect that even modest errors in the modeler’s tonal judgement would stand out in a scene like a sore thumb.
However, some years ago there was a picture in MR that showed a small diorama scene which had been rendered in B&W to match its B&W photo backdrop for some specific purpose. I think the difficulties involved in its execution were briefly touched upon there. But let’s face it, about 75% of model railroaders can’t even get the regular colors on their home layouts to correspond to reality, why would anyone want to challenge themselves to try it in B&W? [:D]
CNJ831
If you did the whole train room in black and white, too, I wonder if your visitors would think they just lost their color vision… or did the Wizard of Oz trick.
Hi, The reason i did in Black & White & Sepia was to test my new camera. And some pictures have been processed with Photo shop and ACDsee . That’s it.
But I would say that i love this tone, really.
This is one of my favorite layout images I’ve taken. Digitally gray-scaled, though…
Lee
You are correct. I am pretty sure it was featured in MR.
Peter Smith, Memphis
Don’t be silly, of course the other 75% of us can. WE just happen to think in good old 3-strip 20th-Century Fox 1940’s Technicolor.
Tom [:P]
HEY! I didn’t know they had air conditioners back then!
I’ve thought before about doing an entire layout in pure white. More as an artsy conversion piece than anything.
Very interesting idea to model an entirely black and white (B+W) layout.
My sister had some extra B+W film for a photo class so she took some photos of our G scale layout. I liked how some turned out and scanned those for use on our website:
With computer photo editing programs, in addition to turning color photos into B+W, you can even superimpose your trains into real B+W photos, like this one with an LGB mogul pulling a real stocktrain:
Matt–
That last shot is very creative! [tup]
I rather enjoy digitally altering photos, but I thought sepia wasn’t a deliberate effect. I was under the impresssion that it was simply the appearance of B&W photos that have faded with age and exposure to light. But however it’s done, it’s a good look.
Cheers,
Mark.
Sepia toning was a photograpghic process developed late in the 19th century which helped to prolong the life of photographs. It chemically stabilized the silver grains on the print to keep the image from fading.
CNJ831