Blue Angels with my 100mm - 400mm

Looking for some C&C on these shots. This is my 2nd time shooting fast moving things. Do some look over processed?

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To my eye they seem underprocessed in this sense: the planes themselves feel a little underexposed. Maybe this means increasing overall exposure; maybe this means leaving sky as is and using masking to bring out detail in the planes themselves.

In camera raw or Lightroom, whichever you have,move exposure up 1/2 stop and fill light to about 1/3rd, recovery slider at 100%. See how you like that.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Sam, I tried your suggestion, but since what I've posted is already edited in Photoshop with some Topaz adjustment layers going on, adding an additional adjust as you mentioned just doesn't work. It gets very washed out and looks really bad. So I'm going toke your suggestions and apply that to the RAW image and use that for a starting place. Thanks again.

Yes, start with tone, color, contrast in camera raw, then move to CS.

Christopher Steven b wrote in post #14592704
To my eye they seem underprocessed in this sense: the planes themselves feel a little underexposed. Maybe this means increasing overall exposure; maybe this means leaving sky as is and using masking to bring out detail in the planes themselves.

Agreed.

Nice composition of most of them otherwise!

Well I updated some of the adjustments in Photoshop and then re-published my new work to flickr and now I see that was a mistake. Looks like they're gone from above. Guess I'll know not to do that again. Damn! Time for a revised workflow.

So anyway... thanks so much for the comments and suggestions. I'm going to start a little slower this time with 3 pictures. I made adjustments in Camera Raw first (thank you Sam) and then did some cleanup in CS5. Please let me know what you think of these. Color OK? Too light? Too dark? I'll tell you this much... they look different on every monitor I've looked at, I don't know what to think anymore.

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Dramatic difference. The only areas I might wonder about (I can't judge at this size) would be application of localized sharpening, and more importantly, a possible halo-ing around the planes indicating that they weren't well masked.

Either way--yes, they're way better.

Hopefully Jay can stop in to provide pointers specific to aircraft shooting + editing. He's one of the greats.