Correcting colour when there isn’t any :o)

Have a look at this photograph, taken by a friend of mine at an airshow on a particularly grey day:

http://www.esses.co.uk/bigginhill05/321_2147.htm

I figured I could improve that a bit, but it’s not as easy as it looks. I found a number of ways to lift the colour in the smoke trails, and to boost the contrast a bit, but the sky has me stumped. It’s almost purely even grey, so there’s no colour to manipulate.

My clumsy attempts to colourize, or in some way insert some more pleasing colour (blue sky, for example!) just screws the smoke colours. Making a selection of the sky, without the smoke trails, has proved somewhat tricky.

How would the assembled experts improve this photo?

On that shot, just a simple AutoLevels makes the smoke (and planes) pop rather nicely.

Then go into Color Balance, move the top slider to cyan and the bottom to blue. That gives more definition to the sky and hides the overcast.

In article <PVlTe.1787$>,
Jeff G wrote:

On that shot, just a simple AutoLevels makes the smoke (and planes) pop rather nicely.

Then go into Color Balance, move the top slider to cyan and the bottom to blue. That gives more definition to the sky and hides the overcast.

Or try going into Channel Mixer after doing your levels and playing with the red and blue sliders for the blue channel.

Have a look at this photograph, taken by a friend of mine at an airshow on a particularly grey day:

http://www.esses.co.uk/bigginhill05/321_2147.htm

I figured I could improve that a bit, but it’s not as easy as it looks. I found a number of ways to lift the colour in the smoke trails, and to boost the contrast a bit, but the sky has me stumped. It’s almost purely even grey, so there’s no colour to manipulate.

My clumsy attempts to colourize, or in some way insert some more pleasing colour (blue sky, for example!) just screws the smoke colours. Making a selection of the sky, without the smoke trails, has proved somewhat tricky.

How would the assembled experts improve this photo?

Have a look at this photograph, taken by a friend of mine at an airshow on a particularly grey day:

http://www.esses.co.uk/bigginhill05/321_2147.htm

I figured I could improve that a bit, but it’s not as easy as it looks. I found a number of ways to lift the colour in the smoke trails, and to boost the contrast a bit, but the sky has me stumped. It’s almost purely even grey, so there’s no colour to manipulate.

My clumsy attempts to colourize, or in some way insert some more pleasing colour (blue sky, for example!) just screws the smoke colours. Making a selection of the sky, without the smoke trails, has proved somewhat tricky.

How would the assembled experts improve this photo?

How’s this?
http://www.tnphoto.com/321_2147_clr.jpg
I made another layer under the airplane layer and filled it with a blue-to-blue gradient, then ran Filter>Render>Clouds on it. I changed the blend mode of the airplane layer to Hard Light and voilá!

I got Dan Margulis’ canyon conundrum book last friday and after reading the first chapters found your photo serves well as an example of what can be done in LAB, or cannot, if Timo is right 😉
At http://tinyurl.com/b2zmh you will find my – a little bit exaggerated – version as a jpeg. If you like the result, you can download the psd file to which it links and pull the curves adjustment layer to your original, which you will have to convert to LAB first.

I got Dan Margulis’ canyon conundrum book last friday and after reading the first chapters found your photo serves well as an example of what can be done in LAB, or cannot, if Timo is right 😉
At http://tinyurl.com/b2zmh you will find my – a little bit exaggerated – version as a jpeg. If you like the result, you can download the psd file to which it links and pull the curves adjustment layer to your original, which you will have to convert to LAB first.

That’s remarkable. I guess to most people it just looks like a colour correction, but to me, the guy who spent an hour fiddling about in RGB space trying to get what I wanted, and thus who understands exactly how hard it was, it’s astonishing.

Perhaps I ought to buy that book!

I got Dan Margulis’ canyon conundrum book last friday and after reading the first chapters found your photo serves well as an example of what can be done in LAB, or cannot, if Timo is right 😉
At http://tinyurl.com/b2zmh you will find my – a little bit exaggerated – version as a jpeg. If you like the result, you can download the psd file to which it links and pull the curves adjustment layer to your original, which you will have to convert to LAB first.

That’s remarkable. I guess to most people it just looks like a colour correction, but to me, the guy who spent an hour fiddling about in RGB space trying to get what I wanted, and thus who understands exactly how hard it was, it’s astonishing.

Perhaps I ought to buy that book!