Adamski wrote:
I realise that each area may originate from different satellite data sets, but I'd have thought some post-processing colour correction to achieve some degree of standardisation could have been used <??>>.
Aerial images are always going to be especially difficult, just because of the way they are made. The nice, tidy images we see on sites such as LINZ are already tweaked within an inch of their lives, just to get individual photos to align and match. The problem is that ANY adjustment to an image is actually damaging the image -- you already start with a limited colour/tonal range, so shifting it around throws away some information. That's why we use 16 bit RAW images in photography etc, in that you start with more information that you actually need, so the 'processed' image still has a good range of colour/tones. Aerial images are invariably 8 bit by the time we get them, but after the processing they've already have, probably closer to 6 bit.... So for Orbx to have a consistent range across different areas would mean a further adjustment, and loss of detail.
This can really be a headache, I normally aim for minimal adjustments, getting a project area at least looking visually ok. Then down the track I try to join it up with another area, and that's almost impossible.
I really don't know how the simulator does this, there does seem to be a consistency to it, while still retaining a bit of richness. However the quality is still extremely variable, of course, as the info they start with ranges from great to missing completely. Overall, it does an amazing job, but you can't always look closely -- that's one of the reasons why I love the grass, up close it covers a multitude of sins.
There's been a lot of discussion on development forums about how tricky it can be to match new imagery to the default, I haven't tried this yet, but from these discussions I'm not really looking forward to it. One small positive -- at least in NZ we have the LINZ data, not many places in the world have that sort of resource freely available.
I haven't tried anything to tweak the look of MSFS, as this is a slippery slope which I don't always come back from:) However even using Prepar3d v5 on my new system without access to PTA seems like a backward step visually, so I am on the lookout for the ultimate MSFS tweaker....