Post Processing Predicament

Classified

Senior Member
What would you do if you were me? I use Photoshop CS6, but I can't quite get this photo to pop, nicely.

What adjustments would you suggest to get better contrast? I can't quite get the white on the bird to turn white.

BTW I shoot Raw + Basic JPG. This is a crop of the JPG. I shot this in Shutter priority because my 70-300 doesn't have VR. I grabbed this at 1/1600.


DSC_1068a.jpg

Thanks
 

Classified

Senior Member
Oh, sorry for the no EXIF info, I thought that happened automatically.

This was taken with a
Nikon D5300 and a
70-300 all the way out at F/6.3.
The ISO is 200, so I got that going for me!

Thanks in advance!
 
First off the Basic JPG will never get you to where you want. Do you processing on the RAW file. Use these settings to get the EXIF data to show here in the forum.

Guidelines to adding a photo to your post.

1. Resize photo to 1000px on the long side.
2. Resolution set to 72ppi (Pixels Per Inch)



 

Samo

Senior Member
If you shoot this sort of subject a lot next time put the camera on auto and fire off a round just to see what the camera thinks and what the resulting image looks like compared to your settings. It may be that the aircraft is just to far away for your camera/lens combo to handle. If that is the case then you will probably have to achieve the whiteness of the aircraft manually in PP somehow.

The images seem cooked looking to my eyes. The contrails are fuzzy and bright white and the sky looks almost to blue...funky. Have you already processed these to some degree? I am looking at this on a phone so it may be my side.
 
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Classified

Senior Member
If you shoot this sort of subject a lot next time put the camera on auto and fire off a round just to see what the camera thinks and what the resulting image looks like compared to your settings. It may be that the aircraft is just to far away for your camera/lens combo to handle. If that is the case then you will probably have to achieve the whiteness of the aircraft manually in PP somehow.

The images seem cooked looking to my eyes. The contrails are fuzzy and bright white and the sky looks almost to blue...funky. Have you already processed these to some degree? I am looking at this on a phone so it may be my side.

No doubt, this flight is far away. According to my Plane Finder app it's at 35,000 ft.

As I mentioned, I shoot RAW + JPG, in this case I just grabbed the JPG, cropped it waaaay down and sized it to 1000 x 72 for the post. I didn't fudge the color settings at all.
 
No doubt, this flight is far away. According to my Plane Finder app it's at 35,000 ft.

As I mentioned, I shoot RAW + JPG, in this case I just grabbed the JPG, cropped it waaaay down and sized it to 1000 x 72 for the post. I didn't fudge the color settings at all.


No point in even talking about it until you work on the RAW file. JPEG will never do what you want.
 

Blacktop

Senior Member
No doubt, this flight is far away. According to my Plane Finder app it's at 35,000 ft.

As I mentioned, I shoot RAW + JPG, in this case I just grabbed the JPG, cropped it waaaay down and sized it to 1000 x 72 for the post. I didn't fudge the color settings at all.

There is nothing you can do to this shot right here in post. Sorry, but you have way too much atmosphere between the camera and the plane. Plus, combined with heavy cropping, I'm afraid you will not get anything close to what you want.

If you like shooting planes, you may want to search out air shows, or try shooting near an airport .
 

Classified

Senior Member
If you like shooting planes, you may want to search out air shows, or try shooting near an airport .

I love shooting planes, as a matter of fact I have a Marine Corps base a dozen miles to the east from me. There's a VFR corridor over my house and the heavy lift choppers rattle every thing on their way out. I'm still working on how to get a good photo of the choppers - I'm trying to get more blur from the rotors, rather than stopping them with a fast shutter speed.

I took this commercial flight photo just as a challenge - and I like that I can read the DELTA on the belly of the craft.
 

Classified

Senior Member
There is nothing you can do to this shot right here in post. Sorry, but you have way too much atmosphere between the camera and the plane. Plus, combined with heavy cropping, I'm afraid you will not get anything close to what you want.

By the way, I think you may have nailed it - there might not be anything I can do. Other than get a faster / longer lens. Or maybe a full frame sensor camera.

On a 6000x4000 raw photo, that plane is just a tiny white scratch going across until I crop it.
 

sonicbuffalo_RIP

Senior Member
I still agree with everyone that your raw file needs to be downsized/compressed to what Don posted, then someone can work with the file and we can see the exif. If you've already done this, I apologize.
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
Pretty good! You sharpened it up which made a big difference in contrast.
Well I did several things... Rarely do I get good results when using big, full-swings of the processing "hammer". I prefer instead to tap away lightly at a lot of small things very carefully. I have no doubt someone who's more knowledgeable about Photoshop could do a much better job than what I did but in all honesty I didn't feel compelled to spend a lot of time on this shot. That being the case, it got a couple big whacks and some follow-up tapping. Total time invested: about ten minutes.

Noise reduction helped a lot. Then there was a Levels adjustment, some HSL adjustment, some contrast adjustment, a clarity adjustment, some vignette control, I used the Color Picker to clean up the sky... I don't remember sharpening the image but I might have used a High Pass Filter at some point; I dunno really. It was pretty early in the morning for me at the time.
 
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Classified

Senior Member
I took one more shot at it this morning, only this time I grabbed it moving away from the sun.

Also, I set the camera to Spot Metering, rather than Matrix and I centered the plane as best I could. I thought it would help but it didn't make much difference. This pic came from RAW file.

A big thanks to everyone for the input!

DSC_1130a.jpg
 
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