P86392 - GWR 4270, Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway - Lineside - Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway

Seen here heading the 11:48 freight working from Cheltenham Racecourse to Toddington.  

This photograph is somewhat of a labour of love.  My first attempt at processing it was fine, apart from a patch of burnt-out skyline on the left of the photograph, and perhaps under other circumstances, I would have left it at that.  However, I felt that I should be able to do something about this; the problem I had was finding a method that didn't look wrong when compared to the skyline through the trees on the right.  In the end, I went back to the RAW image and reduced the exposure and highlight levels on that, bringing out a skyline definition.  From there, it was a case of pushing parts of the image in one direction and others in the other to get this.   

There was also an issue of composure; my initial attemps cropped the right hand side of the photograph off slightly, but this produced the effect of having a tree looking like it was growing out of thin air, so in the end, I've stuck with the composition as taken.  I've also removed some overhead wires.

This is perhaps a photograph I could work on for months, but there are other things I want to get on with, and there's no guarantee that any more time would produce a better image, so I've decided to go with this version.  The comments I've received so far off Photo4Me for this image are positive, which is encouraging.