Beautiful Photo, Michael -
Without seeing the 'before', I'll have to take your word that the above 'after' has been
"doctored", as it sure looks natural to me!
Here's the second step of my latest effort - opening the 48-bit scan as 'Camera Raw'
in Ailments 10, adding a lot of Fill Light & Clarity (mid-tone contrast) and then using
Recovery to eliminate the resultant clipping of the highlights in the clouds
:
The next step was to open the file AS A COPY to avoid updating the original scan file, and then to Adjust Lighting by first Darkening Highlights (Lighten Shadows produced a lot of noise, so I left it at zero), and then using Levels to get the blacks really black, the clouds truly white and the over-all color balance looking right (at least to me) by setting very top of the cab to neutral grey. There's still a bit of noise on the pilot and even more on the front of the cab, but I'm hoping Elements' Reduce Noise filter can take care of that later today
:
This photo is beginning to look a lot better than my first attempts a couple of months ago and even last week - and most of the other challenging ones aren't really worth the effort to try to rescue - so MAYBE I won't need TuFuse or Photomatix after all.
-
Roosso
p.s. The best way to get exactly what you want is to commission a great artist like Jeff Ellingson of the D&S to do a painting based on your photo - see [
ngdiscussion.net]
...
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2015 09:04PM by Russo Loco.