What Would you do to make this photo better/more interesting?

Question

Straight forward question.

I took this one evening this summer. It's not photoshopped at all.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cynicalifornia/2451700382/

Lemme know what you think.

Gracias.

Answer 1

The airplane is hard to see since it's so dark, but the colour in the sky is nice and you don't want to lose that richness.

Using the GIMP, in order I:

(i) reduced chroma noise via the "Wavelet De-noise" plugin;

(ii) selected the background using the "similar colours" tool;

(iii) reduced the Value mid-point in the Levels dialog;

(iv) inverted the selection to edit the foreground;

(v) increased the Value mid-point, reduced the Blue mid-point;

(v) deselected the foreground (editing the whole image now); and

(vi) and sharpened a bit.

Just a quick sketch: http://xs330.xs.to/xs330/08351/245170038...

If you have a higher-resolution version, work with that and then resample down to the size you want, rather than re-touching a resampled image.

Answer 2

the plane can't be seen well

it blends with the ground

Answer 3

take it into ps 3 and lighten the foreground a little to give the plane a little more definition,otherwise its spot on, a nice pic

Answer 4

Hey, I know that plane!  It's the SR-71 Blackbird!  Beautiful aircraft!  Okay, I'd have taken that one horizontally, with more sky and less of the ground detail.  Those signs just do nothing for the composition.  I like the way it shows the contours of the Blackbird, but I'd like to see a true black in there somewhere, so maybe just a little darker.

Blackbird Radiant is better, but too bad about those bushes in the background.  Bushes have a funny way of ruining things, don't they?