NZFF

Stunning once again!

Please let us in on your secret- how do you make these sort of images? Do you take a screenshot of an aircraft against a blank sky background then cut it out in photoshop? I'd love to give it a go myself if I knew how to do it properly

I just find interesting high resolution photo that might make an interesting screenshot. Every time I fly I take screenshots from different angles, in the sky and on the ground with the engines turned off. I cut the aircraft out of the screenshot, making it a new layer and then cutting out the shadow as well. The shadow is created by making a new layer of the cutout, matching the in-game shadow, but I fill the layer with black colouring. I do not take the actual in-game shadow since it will not look good. The cutout aircraft and shadow layers in dragged onto the photo background that I have chosen for the particular composition, carefully aligning them to the background...with shadow layer lower than the aircraft layer of course. The transparency of the shadow layer is adjusted to match the background.

The aircraft layer is then edited to match the colours of the background (different whether its meant to look realistic or just artistic) and adding various effects (self-shadowing, lights, lens flares etc.) and changing the lighting and colouring. Everything is then merged into one image, where I edit it further, lighting, effects etc. Its a learning process, some edits take hours.

Thanks