In flight picture, desperatly seeking to be rescued.

[Kell]

I toke this one aboard a plane, after about half an hour trying to convince the flight attendant I'd be quick. So I didn't have time to play with the settings (first time on plane too, so there were other things in my mind).
It *should* be a good picture, seeing as the sight was superb, but apparently I didn't fully succeed in capturing the moment.

So I keep wondering, what can I do to rescue it? What do you suggest? I've tried a lot of post-processing (color balance, contrast enhancement) but couldn't reach any result that really caught my eye. Also I'd like to keep it in full colour (no b/w, sepia, etc). So I beg of you, what can I do?

http://www.dagonar.com/kell/g/Experiments/Landscape/Above%20clouds.jpg

I thank in advance for any ideas.

[gsmx2]

Hard to know how to fix it to what you saw, but I used Paint Shop Pro 8.0 and did the "One Step Photo Fix" on it, which does exposure, color balance, saturation, sharpening and edge smoothing. This is what it created. Is that more like what you saw?

http://home.earthlink.net/~gsmx2/untitled.jpg

gsm x2

[ssim]

For me this is a hard shot to try and do anything with. I took a run at and the result is below. I did a separate selections on the upper clouds and adjusted the levels and then selected the ground underneath and adjusted it. I ran it through neat image to reduce the noise.

http://www.pbase.com/image/25797236.jpg

[Kell]

Hi,

@gsmx2,
I also use PsP8, and also tried both the one step fix and customizing each step. The whole picture gains a non natural painting-like effect - I usually find the predefined setting for Automatic Color Balance too strong (usually prefer a strength of 10-15). What you got *is* somehow closer to reality, but the end result is obviously too pixelized and saturated. Thanks for the attempt though, it strengthens my feeling that it's not that simple doing something useful with the picture, that someone went through similar steps to those I tried. :)


@ssim,
now there's a different result. I think the ground looks superb in your result, but the clouds look too well defined and dark at the edges. The effect of seeing through clouds (at the bottom) of the original picture is lost. There's also a glow in the cloud's contour to the right. Nothing I tried resembled that - I didn't try seperating the picture though, basically because of that "see through clouds" effect at the bottom. But it's worth trying.

Thanks for both your attempts, I'll keep trying. If you do feel like giving it another try, I'll be eagger to look at the results.

Cheers.

[mvrekum]

Hi,

Here is my little try.
I used PS7.
Autolevels
Save image
Brightness +80/Contrast +20
Saved the image under new name
Desaturated the image and copied it to use as layer mask.
Open first saved image
Apply layer mask
Paste the saved image into the mask selection
Flatten the image
Clouds are now original and earth is lighter.
Filter -> noise -> despeckle (remove a bit of the noise)
Unsharp mask
Ready

Here is the final result:
http://www.photofile.nl/postings/Untitled-2.jpg

Hope you like it.
Martin

[ijohnson]

I like ssim's the best however I am not sure what this is a picture of. I have to guess that between the scratched up windows, and the general haze, you tried to take the impossible picture. Maybe a polarizing filter might have helped with all that interference.

I think that next time you might want to pop the exit doors and step out on to the wing for a better shot.

[gsmx2]

I like ssim's the best however I am not sure what this is a picture of. I have to guess that between the scratched up windows, and the general haze, you tried to take the impossible picture. Maybe a polarizing filter might have helped with all that interference.

I think that next time you might want to pop the exit doors and step out on to the wing for a better shot.

If you take IJ's suggestion, please remember to take a monopod. Even at fast shutter speeds, you'll need the stabilization to steady the camera as the jet spins and plummets at 600 mph.

gsm x2

[Kell]

@mvrekum,
Thanks, the description of the procedure you followed gives me a couple new ideas to try, specially the masking, which I hadn't considered. Your version is certainly the closest to what really was there. I'll try and reach similar results using the directions you posted. Actually, between the 3 versions posted I already learned a few things.

@ijonhson,
Well, it's probably a hard shot to take, but I don't have enough experience to recognize that, so I kinda blame it upon my inability to pick the best settings (at the moment, I didn't even use manual mode). Either way, the picture means a bit more to me that it probably does to the rest of the world, seeing as it's a location I'm familiar with and I wouldn't be seeing it for quite some time - so the clouds were kinda fit to the frame of mind at the time.

As for poping the exit doors, I think it'd have been a little harder to con the flight attendant into that. But if the polarizing filter fails next time, I'll surely bear that in mind. ;)