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by kmote00 1023 days ago
According to the article, the "colors ... are, importantly, not added for dramatic effect — these photos and all aspects of them, are real."

What processing are you referring to?

3 comments

The colors may have been there in the raw image, but it's clear to anyone who has experience in photography and photo editing that these images were at the very least, enhanced to bring out those colors. The simplest version of doing this is turning the saturation knob way up - but professionals typically use much more nuanced tools than that.

Especially in the ground pictures, a lot of work was done on the global/local contrast to achieve detail across the brightness range. In addition, manually brightening and darkening some of the areas to guide the eye. These are things photographers have always done since the early days of photography - however with modern tools, it's easier to achieve a look that goes too far, and starts coming off as "synthetic" or "video-gamey".

I also think they just did a swap of the sky in some of the dramatic cloudy shots.

real != raw

an example of the postprocessing can be seen in the first photo, where the yellow painted flight line is glowing in the dark

I don't deny the colors are real. It's just that they're now an exaggeration of what was there.