[FSXA] Photoscenery not blending well

[JPetroSS]

Hello guys,

I am trying to blend a satellite map into fsx, but I have bad results as you can see from the screenshot below.

I want to smoothly blend the photoscenery.......but I get this bad blending result

Why does this happen? Is my Photoshop rendering the TIFF file in low quality?

[arno]

Hi,

This is quite normal if you look at how transparency is stored in DXT3 textures for example. I am not sure how the photoscenery BGL stores the transparency, but it could very well be that they only use a limited amount of bits for it.

Why do you need gradual blending in the water? Would it not make more sense to just stop at the shoreline?

[Golf-HotelDelta]

I am not rich enough to use Photoshop, however I can get acceptable results using the Selections/Modify/Feather feature of Paint Shop Pro, or just use greyscale and paint the land white and water black and leave the greyscale inbetween:

[JPetroSS]

Originally Posted by arno

Hi,

This is quite normal if you look at how transparency is stored in DXT3 textures for example. I am not sure how the photoscenery BGL stores the transparency, but it could very well be that they only use a limited amount of bits for it.

Why do you need gradual blending in the water? Would it not make more sense to just stop at the shoreline?

Thanks Arno!

I do not want gradual blending.......
I am trying to avoid those "phases" the water-part of my photoscenery has...!

...and to be more specific here:
The water-part in the photoscenery is an underwater texture!! It is not like I left it as part of land!!

[arno]

Try to only use black and white in your blend mask then. And do you also have a water mask or not?

Send from my phone using Tapatalk, so excuse the short sentences and possible typos

[LCSims]

Going pure black to pure white can cause some (what I call) dithering. Or to try and use an example, cut a piece of paper with scissors and you get a nice clean cut. Take a piece of paper, fold it and press down on the crease and then tear along the crease and you end up with a "dithered" edge. Not real neat.

Even a small blur between black and white helps to alleviate any display issues. Using two or three pixels for the blur should work OK.

The other thing I'm wondering, without an INF file to check the entries on, is whether there is the "Gaussian" command being called and if Resample is implementing it's own blur, with the shown results?

[Golf-HotelDelta]

You could try playing with SamplingMethod, personally I use "Point".

[JPetroSS]

Thanks for the interest and the help guys.

I understand that I'm using an ancient photoshop version and this is probably causing the problem of low quality rendering.

I must update to....CS6?

Not likely!

[robystar]

Hi,

The underwater part is part of the scenery you will see from a plane.
So, if the water is clear, you will miss a part of the photoreal if you do not blend it.
I am using Gimp(as I have apparently even less money than George) , and they have a smudge tool that can make the transition between the photoreal coastline and the default water much more gradual.
I guess in Photoshop and in Paintshop as well.
Keep your watermask as it is but then use the blend mask to make the underwater rocks visible as well. That will make the scenery much more lifelike.

[roger-wilco-66]

The thread is a bit older, but as I do photoreal tropical coastline work in the moment I'll add some of my findings.
First, I wouldn't do too much gray gradience in the blend mask, because this is always visible in the scenery. As I understand, we are working with 8 bit grayscales here and this amounts to only 256 colors. Not much to begin with, and then you do that at quite low resolutions.
I found that if you make underwater structures visible by using grey blendmask, it is best to let the FSX ocean water mask handle the blue coloring of the sea floor and desaturate the underwater part on the phototile to a certain extend. Otherwise, the blue tones will get too dark or oversaturated. Another thing is that users might have different ocean textures installed, which have to mix with any color you introduce here.
I think making nice beach or coral phototiles is a real challenge.

Cheers,
Mark