Sunday, August 26, 2018
Blending Photo and Color Matching
Blending Photo and Color Matching
I had a go at making the water and blend masks for the FIMR airport photo imagery. Heres the latest incarnation:
FIMR Photo Imagery Blended with Default Terrain
To work with the images I opened up the original BMP file from SBuilderX in photoshop and made separate layers for each of the water, blend, day and night textures. To make the water and blend masks I just use the polygon selection tool and filled with black the areas where I dont want the photo to appear. The edge of the blend mask can be softened if desired by tracing around the white region with a soft brush and gradually switch the color from white to a darker grey. For now I just have a hard edge on my blend mask and I traced around a road that borders the airport, so the road acts as a transition.
Im not very good at color matching by eye, so I used the built-in Match Color feature of photoshop. To do this I made a top-down view of the island in FSX and made a screenshot. Then I opened the screenshot in photoshop. The remaining steps are as follows:
- Select the water mask layer and used the magic wand to just select the land area (the white area)
- Select the satellite image layer and hit Ctrl-J to copy just the land area to a new layer.
- Select the new layer and Ctrl-click in the layers palette to make sure the land area is selected.
- Switch to the FSX screenshot image and use the polygon selection tool to select some landclass texture areas that are similar to what you want around the airport (I selected a mixture of heath scrub, forest and crop areas)
- Switch back to the photo image layer and choose Image menu and Match Colors function
- Choose the FSX screenshot image as the source image in the Image Statistics part of the Match Colors dialog. Make sure the matching source and destinations are the selected areas of the 2 images
- You then see a preview of the color match result. Adjust the sliders as desired, then click OK to perform the color match
I added an adjustment layer to lighten the resulting image a bit and grouped both layers into a group called Day, then saved it as a BMP file and updated the .INF file to use this as my Day source image.
You can make a copy of Day and use the following succinct description in this post to make the night image: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showpost.php?p=145319&postcount=5. Then save the _LM version of the BMP and update the .INF file so theres both a Day and Night variant. Then also add the water and blend mask source images.
Youll need to look this over carefully in FSX at different angles and time of day. You can also make additional layers and adjust colors for seasons if you want, and add those variants to the INF as well. Its still a trial and error process but the above procedures gets you pretty close quickly. Unfortunately the resample run can take a while, so the trial and error process can take quite a while.
I think once I add some autogen vegetation to the photo that will also help with some blending. I may also soften the blend mask edges a bit. Im still undecided about the adjustment layer to lighten the image. Photoshop seems to make the image too yellow but in-game it looks closer without adjustment to anything I get by adjusting match result.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment