THE VERY BEST OF COLORIZED RAILROAD PHOTOGRAPHY: Southeastern Steam and Early Diesels

Combining vintage black & white railroad photography with the manual art of digital colorizing, this distinctive album of railroad photo art showcases a collection of the finest images from the cameras of  noted 20th century photographers J. Parker Lamb, David Salter, Hugh Comer, Wiley Bryan, Dick Sharpless, Frank Ardrey and others, collected and published for the first time in true color.

Dozens of colorized black & white images illustrate the transition from steam to diesel power on Southeastern railroads, offering vividly detailed renditions of locomotives and trains of the Atlantic Coast Line, Seaboard Air Line, Southern Railway, Central of Georgia, Louisville & Nashville, Western Railway of Alabama, Gulf, Mobile & Ohio, Frisco, Florida East Coast, and Illinois Central in stunning color. Each full-page colorized image is accompanied on the facing page by the original black & white photo, together with a detailed narrative for historical context.

The introduction includes a step-by-step description of digital artist Tom Alderman's technique. Using black & white scan as his canvas, Tom utilizes digital brushes, pencils, and sprays to manually create a perfectly matched color image from the black & white original. He describes his colorized images as "pseudochromes" owing to their remarkable resemblance to Kodachrome slides, a result unobtainable from even today's most advanced artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT.