Bored during a football game so I decided to start working on Leeuwarden AB for FSX.

The FSX default (the surrounding area is UT Europe landclass)


Where I began after getting SBuilderX to import a Virtual Earth satellite pic and then editing the rectangle down to the relevant AB area.


Color adjusted for Spring - but not sure if I am satisfied with it.


Color adjusted for Autmun - 95% satisfied.


Comments and suggestions welcome.

Ford

You asked for comments and here are mine

It seems your colors are more real than the surrounding area. Therefore it looks a bit, uhm, unreal in total.

Spring:
Perhaps you could reduce the "blue" portion of that green grass.

Fall:
Could use some more brown.

I don't know if I made it clear what I wanted to state here but I hope you get the idea. First English is not my native language and second my skills in adjusting images are poor - except for greyscale ones as I used to work for a company that installed machine vision systems.

On a sidenote: I knew that Visual Earth wiped out most Italian Airforce bases. (Use flashearth.com and search for "Elmas". Select VE and zoom to the south-western part. Switch to Yahoo Maps and you'll see what I am talking about.) But what I did not know until now was that Google Maps displays Leeuwarden pretty blurry

Autumn makes Holland look like a desert! Is this a FSX "feature?"

John

First, thanks both of you for the comments.

Sprocky, no need to apologize for your English. Both of your comments are pretty much as I see it. The blue tinge in the original makes is hard to get rid of comepletely, but I will reduce the saturation a bit more for the green grass/Spring pic. Autumn - kinda same problem, the blue makes turning the grass brown very hard; if I remove it all, the grass loses definition. I'm thinking that the airbase might be a bit more watered/irrigated than the surrounding area overall. Both views still need adjusting, autumn more than spring in my opinion.

Like you, I was surprised to find that Google had deliberately "pixelated" the Leeuwarden AB area - it's not "just blurry". That's a deliberate distortion and I can only assume/guess that it was done as a result of a request/demand by Dutch MoD for security reasons. (There was some talk here in the US that MS Virtual Earth was goig to do that to coverage of US bases - then First Amendment lawyers got involved. Shrug.) So I had to choose between Yahoo and Virtual Earth satellite servers instead of Google, which I usually use. Each server has a distinctly different color caste - and it changes based on when the picture was taken (time of day and season), what the weather was like and even the angle of view of the satellite to the area. Anyway, add to all that the fact that I adjust color using Photoshop on one monitor and then run FSX on another to see the results and that accounts for some of the mismatch with the surrounding area(s).

Thanks again for the critique. You confirmed I may be losing my mind but my eyesight isn't completely gone.

John, yeah it was a "MS feature" that lots of people commented on when FSX first came out. Actually, those textures are "my default" - using UT Europe for the landclass but still very brown. If you remember when FSX first came out, large swaths of central Canada plains also had "desertification"/a huge brown tinge outside the cities - even in summer.

Again, thanks for the comments.