Tips for processing aerial photos

I've taken pictures out the plane's window recently, and I have some trouble with the post-processing. Leaving aside the window glare which I could have avoided with a CPL (which happened to be in a checked-in bag), I'm struggling with two things.

1) Altitude and distance both result in a fairly strong haze over the photo, compressing the dynamic range. In practice, the histogram is compressed in the center. Despite shooting at low ISO and using some limited noise reduction, correcting that (mostly pulling shadows down and highlights up through curves and levels) creates some pretty strong noise. Would a CPL also cut through the haze? Are there any other ways of restoring contrast without inducing so much noise?

2) For some reason, altitude seems to cause a strange shift in colors. Essentially, once I've corrected the contrast, pictures look really instagrammy. It's like there's multiple temperatures in the scenes; shadows tend to have a blue hue, and highlights have a weird hue that I can't seem to pinpoint and correct. The auto-balancing tools don't fix this.

I'm sure other people here have taken pictures from up high. What's your experience with restoring a natural look to them?

Restoring a natural look: I've found that difficult. I experience the same issues you've described. I find over exposing the images, then pulling down the shadows later means less noise than "correct" exposure. For the colour balance I usually end up pulling down the saturation of just the blues, then fixing the white balance the best I can. Using a CPL may cause you further grief out of a plane window. Airliners usually have about 3 layers of plastic/glass between you and the outside world. A CPL often shows up some interesting colours, kind of like oil on top of water.

Airliner or GA? If you're out earlier in the day you may be able to beat the haze, also go on days when there is less humidity. If you can open a window that'll help and a CPL may be pretty effective. I've heard Cessna's have a screw that can be loosened to open them up more, if you're careful not to slam them. Also having some control over altitude to get lower and closer in some areas would be a significant help. The goal translating into something we're used to with terrestrial photography, the less between your lens and subject the better image you're going to have reach back to the sensor. Not so say certain things don't help creatively, but there's a reason it's worth it to clean the dust off the lens every so often.

Do you have the image in a RAW format? I'd get to work adjusting the white balance first, then the overall exposure then pull the blacks boost the shadows, pull the highlights a little, fine tune the white balance a few degrees as needed now that you have a better idea of the final image, then NR and sharpening as needed. At altitude because of how the atmosphere is everything is at a much cooler color temperature, shooting through haze or thin clouds can be like shooting through a cool gray card, spoofing your cameras meter, giving you that blue color cast.

Yeah, I should have exposed more to the right, that was my mistake.

Helpful tips all around, and I'm glad I'm not the only one to run into them. That was an airliner flight, so I was pretty much in control of nothing.

You'll find the RAW file below, feel free to play with it. I'd be interested to see what one can come up with. Mind, it's a Fuji X-trans RAW file, but LR and ACR should play along just fine.

https://www.yousendit.​com …ad/UVJoWWV0WkJV​VG5OUjhUQw

Well I had to do the update from LR4.1 to 4.4 (I could never get 4.2 or 4.3 to install properly on my system) to process your RAW file. This was my best effort. You are always going to struggle with images from airliners, you are generally looking through 2 or 3 layers of often not that clean perspex. Using a CPL is never going to work, as you will always end up with those weird polarisation effects that you get from looking at/through perspex. If you want a look at the settings let me know and I will put the XMP on dropbox for you.

Alan

Here's what I got out of it from a little time of LR5