Previous Blue Angel

I am still in the midst of processin images from Oshkosh. I took a number of bracketed exposures to make HDRs. This one was taken one morning at the Warbirds Area. As usual, I took 5 one-stop differences images, and took first, middle and lat for processing. I tried the Painterly preset in Photomatix, everybody is so fond of recently, maybe after Scott Kelby’s recommendation. Not bad as a starting point, but required some tweaking. I lowered the saturation first. And then some more. Still, all those blues in this image almost hurt the eye. The rest of post-processing was just increasing the contrast between different parts of the image.
The airplane is a Blue Angel marked Grumman Bearcat. Current Blue Angels fly Hornets, but you can read more about the history of this selected group of military pilots and their airplanes here.