Despite being outdoors and generally enjoying good light, sometimes you need some "skillz" to salvage an aviation image when things don't go quite as planned.
In this case, this Miami Air 737-800 decided to fly straight through a cloud shadow right as it reached the angle I wanted so I had to perform a little digital miracle.
As imported to CS5 from LR:
Finished Image as it looked in CS5:
The Layers (what each does is explained below)
- Background .. Original Image imported from Lightroom
- Layer 1 .. Mask Layer .. Aircraft Only
- Viveza 2 .. Nik Viveza treatment to aircraft only (because of the mask layer)
- Highlights .. Brightest fuselage highlights promoted to their own layer and "Screen" layer property applied (makes the dazzling whites dazzle more)
- Curves 1 .. Allows for overall luminance adjustment of the entire plane.
- Fuselage WB .. Neutralizes the whites which were picking up a lot of blue
- Vivieza 2 Copy .. Copy of the Viveza layer with a High Pass filter applied. Changing the property of this layer to "Overlay" is a sharpening technique (again, plane only!)
- "Layer 1 Copy" .. Inverted mask so that we now affect only the sky and not the plane
- Gradient Fill 1 .. Puts a little dark to light drama in the sky from the top of the frame down
- Hue / Saturation .. Puts some color in the sky and allows me to tweak the hue to a slightly less Robin's Egg Blue shade.
The finished image:
Questions, Comments, Thoughts most welcome...
So yeah, I know what you're saying there.
