When photographing the Patriots demo team, I would often not get close enough to the subject to get a good shot. And that is the case here. This shot was taken at 277 mm. There's a lot more lens I could have used. Rookie mistake.
I've already worked most of the can't miss efforts from that trip , so now working with the reach projects.
And project is an understatement for this one. I've been working for three days on this. I tried On one, Gigapixel, DeNoise and PS. And what wound up working in the end is AI Clear - just confirming what I've found before.
So here is the original RAW image.
ISO 800, f/6.3, 1/8000 sec, 227 mm
NIKON D7200 Ver.1.04/70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6
For me, this will require a super aggressive crop to be interesting. Even if I wanted to get three subjects in the frame, it would still require a aggressive crop. But I want the two to fill the frame. At that tight a crop at ISO 800, from new experience gained, that nice sky will not be the same. This is precisely why I started searching for a product to help smooth out the sky without destroying the rest of the image.
Here is the cropped product.
This won't win any sharpness awards and barely passes the monitor test, but it will make my screen saver rotation. The good news is that AIC did exactly what I wanted it to do. Sky looks great and a lot of the air craft graphics are sharp. For some reason, the 3 on this side is off color. What had me going for a few days was I could get the sky right, but the PATRIOTS graphic would never clear up. Its natural silver reflective flak with red outline was no help at all. Seriously, no help. The missing piece turned out to be Topaz's Detail. Just a little slider here, a little slider there and the image (graphics) improved greatly. (Turns out I purchased Detail some number of years ago, who knew?)
So, note to self, get the frame right the first time and you won't have over software to get the shot you want.
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