Texture colour issues creating photoscenery

[marty2756 65]

Hi
 
I've been creating photosceneries with g2xpl program. Everything works ok, except that almost every airport I choose (doesnt matter if its on USA or Europe)... have textures with different colours and looks really awfull I'm using Bing as map provider.
I just go to bing maps web page, and I can see already there the colour issue.
Is there somethign I'm doing wrong ? Can't understand why most of the locations I've tried have this problems.
As an example, KSEA.

[tonywob 4,769]

Have you tried in Google maps? Their imagery generally seems to be better quality

[mdavis 10]

I use Bing with JOSM because it's fast.  I don't recall seeing such color variation between tiles.  Interesting...

[marty2756 65]

I tried google maps.. its generally better yes, altough it has a download limit.

I wanted to know if anybody uses bing and have this problem so frequently. I would say of 10 major airports I tried

within europe and US , I found 8 to have lets say "non-aceptable" texture colour variation , like this one I posted from KSEA.

Seemed strange to me. Perhaps I was doing something wrong, and I had to change I don't know.......  service version or something different in g2xpl.ini to fix it. At least looking it with a browser, bing just doesn't seem to be usefull for creating photoscenery. IF anybody knows any workaround for this please let me know. I will have to stay with google maps I guess.

[alulekk 3]

I tried google maps.. its generally better yes, altough it has a download limit.

I wanted to know if anybody uses bing and have this problem so frequently. I would say of 10 major airports I tried

within europe and US , I found 8 to have lets say "non-aceptable" texture colour variation , like this one I posted from KSEA.

Seemed strange to me. Perhaps I was doing something wrong, and I had to change I don't know.......  service version or something different in g2xpl.ini to fix it. At least looking it with a browser, bing just doesn't seem to be usefull for creating photoscenery. IF anybody knows any workaround for this please let me know. I will have to stay with google maps I guess.

 

I had the same issue with Bing - It's basically why I abandoned the ortho scenery idea (also because of the google d/l limits)

[tonywob 4,769]

 

 

I use Bing with JOSM because it's fast.  I don't recall seeing such color variation between tiles.  Interesting...

 

Depends, JOSM doesn't have the highest zoom-level of Bing (At least in the UK anyway), so you might be working on an older less zoom-level which has more uniform colour.

[mdavis 10]

The image shown above is very interesting in that while it appears to have been pieced together with tiles taken from different photo sources, the seams are not "square."  Note the angle of the runway at the south end and the fact that the top margins are "square" while the bottom margins are beveled or angled.  If the tiles had been square, it would be a minor matter to cut them into smaller 2048 x 2048 squares and "fix" the color in a digital editor like Photoshop or PSP.  That is still possible but it would require some masking and more work.  I would offer to help work on those orthos, but my DSL connection is so slow it would take a long time to transfer files back and forth.  I can handle the Photoshop editing but I'm still learning how to use the ortho overlays.

 

@Tonywob, did you see the new OrthoMagix application uploaded to .org that has a nice GUI for cutting big ortho sections into pieces?  It's a beta, but it looks great.

[Jim Robinson 122]

I know nothing about making photoreal for X-Plane but I assume you need imagery and you need to know the coordinates of the corners? I've used SBuilderX to download tons of imagery and I've never seen any limit to how much data you can transfer from google maps. SBX will assemble all the .jpg tiles from the map server into a large .bmp with an accompanying txt file containing the corner coords. Could you not use SBX in that case to source imagery for X-Plane?

 

 

Neither google maps or VirtualEarth satellite show the discoloration at that location in Seattle BTW.

 

 

 

The only caution is that the imagery SBuilderX has access to is commercial imagery and must be licensed if it's to be distributed. Nothing stops you from making massive photoreal areas for your own use however.

 

Jim

[marty2756 65]

mmmm

Browsing now,  again with bing maps,... I can see the same KSEA image , but without colour issues. :huh: just as the image above.

Browser is the same, zoom level is the same, place is exactly the same, everything the same, except done in different moments.

Absolutely lost.

[tonywob 4,769]

Now I'm confused also :smile:. Perhaps it's the map version number, or your browser cache or something strange like that. I'm also not seeing that discolouration at KSEA. Have you tried in different browser?

[marty2756 65]

In fact both the first discoloured image and the correct one, was made with firefox. I tried other browsers now, and in all of them KSEA looks OK.

 

@Jim

Yes ... unfortunately google maps has a download limit , I guess I was banned (for a day) when I reached 4 or 5 GB.

 

Anybody knows , perhaps Jim if you know FSX, this tileproxy program, I saw it has a function "color hack", that tries to correct in some way texture colors... is that possible ? If so, may be can be ported to g2xpl

[mdavis 10]

I think you need to figure out what the problem is before we try to "fix" it.  My Bing view is OK.

[marty2756 65]

@mdavis

 

Yes, sorry I didn't made my self clear... with that comment of coulor hack of tileproxy and so.. I was refering to correct well-known texture color issues found in some places in bing or google in an automated way.

[mdavis 10]

Maybe try with another browser and/or graphics card?  It shouldn't matter, but if the rest of us aren't showing color differences, it suggests something on your system that the rest of us don't have.  Or maybe just (conicidently) those airports you checked.  I don't know of any way to automatically fix it.  If the tiles were all square and the color difference ended at the tile borders, it could be rather easily done in a good editor like Photoshop, but with erratic boundaries, it would have to be a manual fix for each airport.

[Jim Robinson 122]

I haven't played with tileproxy so I don't know about the color hack. I do know it's possible to automate color adjustments with a command line tool like nconvert.exe but I'm not sure how efficient it would be on huge chunks of imagery. Maybe tileproxy does something like that? I usually download a map with SBuilderX and then just put some color adjustment layers on them in PhotoShop. I've got some saved selective color presets and I usually just try one then the other until I find one that best matches the landclass textures and then maybe make some fine adjustments from there. I usually put on a hue & saturation adjustment layer and also a brightness & contrast layer as well. I'm just using PS CS2 which is available for free in a roundabout way. Having the saved presets saves a lot of fiddling with sliders which is something I absolutely hate, lol.

 

I just did a bunch of photoreal for the Black Rock Desert from google satellite but I don't think I was anywhere near 4 or 5 GB. Less than a gig altogether I think, maybe they do "ban" you when you use that much bandwidth, I'd never know because with my lousy internet it'd take me a week to download, lol.

 

(Black Rock Desert screenshots if anyone's interested)