Aircraft in dull weather. Anything I can do to improve?

[Kermit power]

Evening All. Between the Typhoon at Goodwood, and then whatever they could manage to get in the air at Yeovilton last Saturday, whilst I managed to have a play with my new 2x TC and my Sigma 70-200, the results were somewhat depressing.

I don't blame the lens combination for this, so much as the misfortune of having grey skies and grey planes on both occasions. The best I've managed to get are shown below. Is there anything I could've done, either whilst taking them or in post-processing (short of pasting in a different sky) which would give them a bit more impact?

I'd probably have junked the second one btw if it wasn't for the alignment of the rotor blades being so perfect.






















Of course, the answer may just be "get more colourful planes", but that's rather out of my control!

[Simpo Two]

Pretty good and realistic I think - but a dose of curves would brighten things up a bit.

You also have some severe vignetting there.

[Kermit power]

Simpo Two said:

You also have some severe vignetting there.

Ah, yes. On the Seafire and the Sea Vixen? I actually added that myself, just in search of something other than completely uniform grey!

[CVP]

I really like the blade positioning you've managed to capture on the two heli image, starts to add a slightly abstract element to it.

Chris

[SamHH]

Artistically, they look pretty nice to me. If the sky's grey, there's not much you can do about it.

The main problem is that some of them are quite soft, the Typhoon and the second F-16 especially. Maybe it's the teleconverter, but the second Sea Vixen looks much better so I guess it's more likely a focus problem or too slow a shutter speed.

[DIW35]

A new sky might be worth looking at. Quick 5 minute job, which would obviously look better if applied to the full size image.

Before:




After:

[toothrot]

nice result!

[4hero]

the wonders of photoshop (2 minutes work, it shows )

[toothrot]

with those shaddows, did you work on the lunar landing hoax too