Plastic Pilot

With digital photography, it’s very easy to modify and improve pictures using simple software. I will show how to easily improve an in-flight photograph using Photoshop, or any other imaging software.

For this demonstration, I selected a typical picture of an island, taken while overflying the Cannes’s Bay.

This photo is rather typical of what can be done through a light aircraft window with a standard compact camera. Let’s see how we can improve it…

1 - Crop around the subject
Many in-flight photos contain vast areas of… nothing. This can be sky, sea or land. It is also frequent to have wide areas of the picture “obstructed” by a wing, or a the border of the window. A wing can be part of the arrangement, but most of time it is just making the picture unbalanced.

On our picture, the interesting part is clearly… the island. The decision where to crop is a question of personal taste. Some could decide to leave the boat on the right within the picture, but I personally prefer a tighter framing.

With the multi-million pixels resolution of modern cameras, it’s not a problem to keep only a small part of the image. It is important however to do this before any other step, to make sure we will adjust the other parameters to only the interesting part of the picture.

2 - Use Auto Color and Auto Level algorithms
The combination of haze and taking photographs through the window makes the contrast relatively low. All becomes grey-ish. Most image processing softwares include tools to automatically adjust the color level of each pixel so as to use the whole possible range. Search the menus for “Auto Level”, “Auto Color” or “Auto Contrast”. These functions usually work well and generate a much better picture. In “worst case”, i.e. if your picture is already correctly balanced, they will change nothing - a no risk operation.

One can now clearly see the rocky shores and the various cultures on the island. These details were already present in the original picture, but they are now much more visible. Experts will argue that one can obtain best results manually, but we’ll talk about that at the next step.

3 - Manually adjust colors and contrast
The automatic algorithms used for the previous step do a mathematical arrangement to obtain the best dispatching of colors on all the existing range. It is a good basis, but if you can arrange levels manually, you can bias it the way you prefer. This is again a personal taste question, where you can express your art.

By increasing level of green, the forest looks more dense, and the island gets even more imporance.

On the other hand, it is possible to make the sea more predominant by increasing the blue level.

Once again, I’m by far not an expert. What I shown here is simply the result of my own experiments. This is probably the keyword for helping you to enhance your own pictures: experiment. Play with you image processing software, and learn by doing. All tips you might want to share are welcome…

This post is the second in a series about the challenges related to in-flight photography. The first one was about autofocus.