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Any tutorials on creating a night version for phototerrain?
- Thread starter BrBlazer
- Start date
Hello all,
I'm searching for a tutorial on how to make a nice night version of a phototerrain. I've manage to edit my file to make nice seasonal variations, but the night version is a little tougher and what I personally came up with so far is not good
Kindly,
Blazer
Sorry to bump this, but does anybody have a knowledge where I can get this info?
FS9 and FSX, but this is platform independant, it's within photoshop or paintshop pro.
How does it work? Can this mask also be added in photoshop as a new layer over the original photo to make the same/similar effect?
I guess -- although I keep my night mask separate from the rest of the images, because it is a different source and resolution, I've recently used the same technique to clean up the appearance of roads in a colourised image, and this worked fine, so no doubt you could do the same with the night image.
This does, however, depend on your available resources. I start with a georeferenced road map -- my source is here, and covers all of New Zealand, but you may be able to find something similar for your area.
(I can't do a how-to guide, because I use a fairly obsolete set of tools, so I'll just cover the general steps. You'd need to figure out if you can use this for your circumstances.)
The GeoTIFF has roads and highways in orange, so I chroma-mask the orange, do any necessary tidying up, feather the mask until it is a more appropriate width for the roads, and tone it.
While it is still an alpha mask, I can brush on other lit areas, etc, do whatever it takes to add a bit of light variety. If you know the area, you can just follow the map, otherwise I use a Google Earth view side-by-side.
All unlit roads need to be removed from the mask.
But the good thing is, all the roads are practically done, the way my feather works even intersections are well-lit.
By the time I get to the toning stage, I save the mask as a 24 bit image, and discard the original photo. That's after extracting the geo info, so that I can put it back into the edited image.
The night mask is resampled separately, as it is a lot lower resolution than the aerial image. For Real NZ Tauranga, the airport image is 15cm resolution, the city area is 2.5m, and the night mask is about 5m, but it all goes together well.
But as I said, you could use the mask to actually alter your aerial image, you'd just need to match the size somehow. This is easier if you have something like Global Mapper.
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I guess -- although I keep my night mask separate from the rest of the images, because it is a different source and resolution, I've recently used the same technique to clean up the appearance of roads in a colourised image, and this worked fine, so no doubt you could do the same with the night image.
This does, however, depend on your available resources. I start with a georeferenced road map -- my source is here, and covers all of New Zealand, but you may be able to find something similar for your area.
(I can't do a how-to guide, because I use a fairly obsolete set of tools, so I'll just cover the general steps. You'd need to figure out if you can use this for your circumstances.)
The GeoTIFF has roads and highways in orange, so I chroma-mask the orange, do any necessary tidying up, feather the mask until it is a more appropriate width for the roads, and tone it.
While it is still an alpha mask, I can brush on other lit areas, etc, do whatever it takes to add a bit of light variety. If you know the area, you can just follow the map, otherwise I use a Google Earth view side-by-side.
All unlit roads need to be removed from the mask.
But the good thing is, all the roads are practically done, the way my feather works even intersections are well-lit.
By the time I get to the toning stage, I save the mask as a 24 bit image, and discard the original photo. That's after extracting the geo info, so that I can put it back into the edited image.
The night mask is resampled separately, as it is a lot lower resolution than the aerial image. For Real NZ Tauranga, the airport image is 15cm resolution, the city area is 2.5m, and the night mask is about 5m, but it all goes together well.
But as I said, you could use the mask to actually alter your aerial image, you'd just need to match the size somehow. This is easier if you have something like Global Mapper.
That is a wonderfull way to do it. Many thanks.