Thomas Wirtenberger –
Aviation Photography
This workflow is a basic guideline on how to process
digital photos – especially aviation pictures.
Please keep in mind, that there are several methods
and editing programms for photo processing.
I use Adobe Photoshop 7 and the way i describe my
editing here works fine for me, you may encounter problems with this way of
postprocessing, depending on the quality of your picture and your type of
camera, but nevertheless you should get an idea on the necessary steps to get a
photo accepted on Planepictures.net, or just for your own enjoyment.
I use the german version of PS7, but non german
speaking viewers should have no problems to find the respective menu points in
a different language pack, as the structure of PS seems to be the same in all
versions.
The shown screenshots in this workflow are all of low
resolution and compressed to keep the
Filesize down, so they don’t figure the real
appereance of the photo.
The camera used is a Canon EOS 300D, in this case with
a Canon EF 28-105mm attached, focal length was 105mm. Shooting mode was “TV” (Shutterpriority),
with a shutter speed of 1/800 / ISO 100 / F10. Original fileformat was RAW,
converted to TIF for the postprocessing. Of course you may start with your
original JPG file when not shooting in RAW. Please always remember to backup
your originalfile when processing a shot.
This workflow does not give you a garantee of getting
your photos accepted on PP.net or any other database, but should help you to
learn which steps are possible or necessary to enhance your digital picture.
So lets get started! This is how the photo looked in
his basics. Quite underexposed/dark (exposure correction on the camera was set
to -1, to avoid overexposing in bright sunlight.), soft and not centered. All
this issues will be corrected step by step.
The first thing to work on is the exposure/brightness
and contrast of the photo. It’s not a common way to do it like this, but for me
it works. I start by bringing up the levels screen in PS.
Basically i just use the slider in the middle to add
more brightness to the photo (moving it to the left).
I feel more comfortable to adjust the rest with the
“Brightness/Contrast” menu. A “perfect” exposed picture should have the
peaks diversed on the whole diagram. As
you can see in this example, there are no pixels (peaks) on the right side,
showing that the photo is underexposed. You could move the right slider to the
left, untill the point where the pixels are. I don’t like this method, because
in this case it makes the picture look wired. Play around with the levels
yourself to see what they do and if they match your likings.
Next step is to add the already mentioned
Brightness/Contrast to the photo. I just do this by trusting my eyes, you’ll
have to get a feeling how the picture “looks right”.
Be carefull to not overdo it with this sliders! Adding
to much brightness will make your photo look pale/washed out. Adding to much
contrast will make it look dark and overexposed on white spaces like clouds or
a white plane fuselage.
Here you see the values i used. This values are very
high and not usual, but as mentioned the photo come out very underexposed so i
had to give it some serious adjustments.
Next point is bringing out the colours/saturation of
the photo. Here again, be carefull with the settings – otherwise your picture
will look oversaturated and the colours will look unnatural.
Values between 8-15 can be necessary to get nice and
powerfull colours.
Next step is the cropping. Use the crop tool, and
center the plane in the frame. Look at the left and right edges – as there is
nothing to see here besides blue sky a tight crop to the planes edges is
helpfull to avoid a “Small/Distance” rejection ;-) In the end you are the master
of your photo, its your decision on how to crop a foto. Centering the plane is
not always a good idea, depends on the background. Is there something
interesting to see, that justifies a wider crop? Does the plane look better in
the upper part of the frame because the tower and the runway are visible and
add to the atmosphere? Judge for yourself. In this case there is nothing to see
other than the Triple 7. So we go for a centered and quite tight crop.
After choosing your frame, just press enter and you
will get something like this
Now we come to the resizing process. Basically a width
of 1024px should be enough. Any wider formats will only show flaws and problems
a photo has even more. For uploading purposes and viewing on your screen it
isn’t really necessary to have a high resolution file.
Next step is sharpening. We all know the
soft/blurry/resolution and oversharpened/jagged rejection. Basically easy to
avoid, but you will have to invest some time here. First question you should
ask yourself: Is my picture blurry? If the answer is yes, than please don’t
think about uploading such a shot. Blurryness is something that is NOT fixable,
with any editing programm in the world. You may save this photo for your
personal records, but thats it.
Most digital pictures, regardless which camera you use
are soft, in this or the other way. Thats something you have to consider every
time you sharpen a photo.
The best method is to use USM (unsharpen mask). It
gives you good control on the sharpening process. You will notice 3 sliders on
the menu. Please don’t ask me about the Radius/Treshold settings. I never
understood what they are actually doing. But i always leave them at the
settings you see on the screenshot (0,3 / 3) and it works wonderfull for me J
So another “out of the stomach” setting i use, without thinking too much about
it. There are hundreds of sharpening methods. Some sharpen in 3-5 steps with
lower settings, others before resizing and a bit after resizing and so on.
I found out that my photos turn out quite good with
doing a 1 step sharpening after resizing.
This method brings up a bit of work. I change the
strength of USM (between 1-500% are possible) from pic to pic. You can’t use
the same settings all the time, as every photo needs its own percentage.
Of course, i do this once again following my feeling
if the picture is sharp enough or not. No rule of thumb here.
The clue is, to do the sharpening on a duplicate
layer. This way you can erase the jaggies and halos which will appear, but you
don’t have to make a compromise on the sharpening strength making the
Photo look soft. Mostly used values are 300%-500%. You
will need to play around a lot until you’ve found the way USM fits your needs
best.
So here we go: Create a duplicate layer:
Press OK
Select the Unsharp mask menu-item:
In this case 350% seems fine for me. There are of
course jaggies/halos everywhere. I will erase them with the eraser tool, using
a Tool-size of 3. Please zoom into the photo at 200%. You will see the jaggies
and halos much better and the Tool-size fits this scale perfectly. You now
start to erase the jaggies (look like stairs or zick-zack lines) like you where
using a real rubber. Please mind, that you will not see the full jaggies here
because of the low resolution of the screenshot!
Very important!
Set the opacity of the eraser-tool acording to the
part of the plane you are editing, otherwise you will mess up the photo, by
always using for example 100%!!!! See below for my estimated percentages.
Here are my recommended eraser values:
White (sometimes black) halos along the
fuselage/landinggear/tail....: 52% - 65%
Titles: 27% - 35%
Registration: 30%
Logos (especially Tail): 40% - 60%
Horizontal Stabilizer/slats-flaps edges....: 90%-100%
Cockpit window-frames: 45%-50%
Cheatlines: 50%-100% be carefull here!!
Always beginn with a lower setting, just when the
jaggies don’t disappear (always check
Back in 100%
view modus!!!!!) you will have to increase the value.
When you are finished and the result is pleasant for
you, than merge the duplicate layer with the original and you should have a
sharp, jaggiefree image.
The last step is to save your picture as the final
file you are going to upload. We have a 1024px jpeg file here, so saving at the
highest quality, which is 12 in PS will prevent visible jpeg compression aswell
as getting over the allowed sizelimit for uploading.
And here is the final result
http://www.planepictures.net/netshow.php?id=539853
Important
note:
I left a few points out of this workflow, because i
want to do a description for them on their own, implementing this points here
would have blown up this thing too much.
-
LEVELING a shot (always remember to
level with the verticals/horizontals in the background)
-
CLONING OUT DUSTSPOTS (users of DSLR
know what a pain they can be)
-
GETTING RID OF GRAIN (bad weather
shots, taken with high iso values...)
-
RIGHT CROPPING OF CLOSEUPS (no more
“cut off” rejections...)
I will work out this issues in the near future and
bring them to you if you like.
Some legal
stuff:
Please note, that this document within all its
graphics are Copyright Thomas Wirtenberger. I can not be held responsible for
any damage made to your photos by using this workflow as a reference. This
workflow does NOT provide any garantee for acceptances at Planepictures.net
(Flugzeugbilder.de) or any other website. Feel free to download, print and
distribute it to your friends. But please dont change anything without my
written permission. It was a lot of work doing this little help, so please give
me the credits when posting this document anywhere else, i think i deserve it.
The most
important thing: TAKE PICTURES FOR YOURSELF – NOT FOR A WEBSITE!!!
If you have any comments, ideas, suggestions or
questions to this document feel free to e-mail me at:
thomas.wirtenberger -at- yahoo.de
One last thing: The sun is always behind us when
shooting. Exceptions can be shots like this:
http://www.planepictures.net/netshow.php?id=441412
...but thats another story.... ;-)
Best wishes
Thomas Wirtenberger
Planepictures.net Senior Screeningteam