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USAPhotoMaps and Yosemite Valley!

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If you haven't tried out USAPhotoMaps give it a try. I used it to download aerial black and white photos of Yosemite Valley, colored them in a little and placed it on top of a TerraScene .tga in PhotoShop Elements, then put the .tga back in terrascene to slice and pod the file. I know I need to work on the color a little more but it's great fun and not terribly difficult or time consuming to do.Don

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Hi Don!It's beautiful! Hope you go on with this scenery!Did you think to use TerraScene itself for colorization? I've had some thoughts about it but didn't try it yet (too many ideas, not enough time :-) ).It must be easy: put a TS layer on top of the b/w picture, with mode "color only". With some little corrections by hand it should work.I'd be curious to see the result.Cheers!Pascal

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Hi Don,Looks so real. Hope you can upload it in the library.cheerschrisrpll

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Didn't someone produce a tutorial for colorizing satellite photos at one time? If anyone remembers this or knows of a similar resource, I'd love to know the link. I have been having fun playing with USAPhotoMaps and I think it has a lot of potential.

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Dan,You might take a look here:http://www.nps.gov/carto/silvretta/colorize/color.htmlAlso within the "Scenery Project Tutorial" by Norman Cleesattel there is included a chapter by Doug Beam on "Manually Colorizing Satellite Images." This is available at AVSIM. Search for Norman Cleesattel and file name spt08_main_document.zip.Finally, you might also want to try out ColorBMP by Larry Jones. To use it you will need to first convert your jpeg image to bmp but it's pretty cool. I only started playing with it last night. Search for Larry Jones and colorbmp_v1_0.zip.Both of the latter two links were written/designed for Fly! but the information is probably still good with the former and the Larry Jones tool should still work for Fly! II if you're working with terrascene and just looking for a tool to colorize an image and then drape it over the tga.Will look forward to your experiments.Don

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Pascal,Thanks for the encouragement! I'm continuing to play with Yosemite and expanding the boundaries somewhat past Yosemite Valley so I can at least include Hetch Hetchy Reservor and the "Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River." I have experimented with using a terrascene generated tga in the color mode. It can be on top of or underneath the black and white image, it comes out the same. One problem is that snow capped mountains remain gray capped mountains but it generally does give you something to work with. I did use this method with a satellite photo of Oahu to recolor another satellite photo of Oahu with considerably more detail but bad color and it worked great. When I can get the airports repositioned I'll release it.In the case of Yosemite Valley, the terrascene rendering shows only one texture (California Mountain). The land cover data doesn't seem to be working, at least not so as to show the Merced River that runs through the center of Yosemite Valley. But the roads are there so it was easy enough to match up the satellite photo.One tip I found in the FS2002 scenery design forum was to use Mapquest. At Mapquest if you click on "aerial image" at the top of the map it gives you a satellite photo for many areas and if you zoom to somewhere in the midrange (5 to 7) it provides a color image. This can then be saved and stretched over the black & white image. To paraphrase, the suggestion was to then use free transform with distort selected, with opacity set to about 50% and change the opacity of the color layer to 35% and then play with the image adjustments to try to get the colors close to reality. I use Photoshop Elements and I don't think I have "free transform/distort selection" and the coloring seemed to wash out a lot of the detail in the one image I tried but I'll keep playing.How's that Pacific Northwest scenery coming?Don

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Pascal...Your suggestion to use Photoshops "color" layer attribute to colorize B&W Sat Imagery w/ Terrascene works great! I can't believe how easy it was to colorize the satellite imagery I downloaded with USAPhotomaps when I placed a Terrascene-generated image of the same area on top of the Sat image and chose "color" for the layer attribute. I posted in the general forum with some screenshots of the results. Here is a comparison of the untreated B&W photo and the Photoshop "colorized" version:http://home.earthlink.net/~finsdad/FlyII/p...zeExample_B.jpghttp://home.earthlink.net/~finsdad/FlyII/p...zeExample_A.jpgThanks again for the suggestion.

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