I had several comments (via e-mail, Facebook, etc.) about yesterday’s post and today I thought I would follow-up on that post by showing the stages of the final image process.

As you can clearly see by shooting in the direction of the sun the sky is blown out and the airplane actually is back-lit so I had to compensate for that to preserve the detail of the engine.  Notice the big black blob in the center of the propeller 🙂

So the image above is how it came out of the camera.  I did increased the exposure in Camera RAW (Adobe’s free software) a tad just to bring out more of  the detail of the airplane.  Then I transferred this image over to Photoshop.

Next I went back to Camera RAW and changed the exposure (this is one of the many reasons for shooting in the RAW format.) to expose for the sky, which had a beautiful blue color and some nice puffy clouds.  Yep the black blob is still there.

So then I transferred this as a separate image to Photoshop and copied it as a layer to the first image (which was exposed for the mid-tones and shadows.)  Then using a mask I painted in the sky detail from the second photo.  Removed the black blob (it didn’t hurt at all.)  🙂

Finally I added some contrast to the clouds to give them some definition, lightened up the engine compartment a bit more to show some of the detail of the actual engine and added my watermark.

Hope you enjoyed the process.  The entire process took about 8 minutes.  It actually took longer to write this post then it did to process the image.

Tomorrow is my big photo adventure.  I’ll have (hopefully) some neat images to post over the next few days.  Nothing tomorrow however because I’m leaving at zero dark thirty hours.  🙂

Enjoy your Friday and the weekend.  As always I am thankful you stopped by and be careful.