This was before I discovered shooting in RAW so the original is a JPG. I also shot this in shutter priority @ 1/1250 ISO 400 ... also it's at f/9 so I could have shot in av @ f/5.6 and ISO 200 ... stuff you learn :)
Open JPG in Adobe RAW
Up exposure, blacks, clarity, contrast
Open as smart object
create 3 extra smart object layers via copy
create exposure for sky on one layer to make it darker
exposure for aircraft on another much brighter and increased reds
exposure for part of the smoke trails increasing saturation used layer masks to only show the portion of each exposure
strong noise ninja pass on the sky layer
two curves layers
flatten all (create a print file)
resize
noise ninja
border
save
This was one of the outtakes from my free study blue ribboner :)
I don't expect this to do as well as the first one, the aircraft don't have quite as much impact in this, it would be nice to be able to have a larger image as at 720px there is not enough detail, but I'd love above a 6 ... and some favs of course, though I expect the standard of competition to be very good ....
Post Fantastic, when I saw the score hovering at abouy 7 dead I knew it wasn't enough for a ribbon but I hoped for a top ten finsh so 5th is fantastic :)
Thanks for all the great comments and favs and congrats to all as there were loads of fab images in the challenge
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Place: 5 out of 531 Avg (all users): 7.0476 Avg (commenters): 8.2174 Avg (participants): 7.0809 Avg (non-participants): 6.9483 Views since voting: 5333 Views during voting: 447 Votes: 231 Comments: 36 Favorites: 17 (view)
Wow. That was my first thought when this opened. Its like they are coming right for me. Not sure if what wows me is their precision or yours, but your impeccable timing, DOF, sharpness and colors really push this to the top. Impressive. 9
Perfect framing on the formation, I love the way the smoke trails are all visible. The angle of the formation is also nice and consistent with the flow of the smoke. Really well done.
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