Marty says

“I took this picture when I was flying to Portugal with my girlfriend on our first holiday together. The sky gradually cleared up and I was faced with this bright clear view of the clouds way below. The darkness of the sky as it gets to the top of the shot shows how the blue gets darker close to the end of the atmosphere.”

Martin’s Verdict

This photograph got me thinking about a book written by a friend of mine – Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking by Julieanne Kost (O’Reilly Media). Juileanne is better known as an Adobe presenter, but this book reveals her other talents as a photographer and in particular, how she applied her interest in photography with the lengthy amount of time she had to spend flying around the US on road tours for Adobe.

Window seat views are often spectacular, but you do need to carry out a few adjustments to such photographs if you want to create great-looking pictures. This particular shot was really easy to correct. I simply applied a Levels adjustment layer as shown here, which expanded the contrast and then added a gradient to the adjustment layer so that the top of the sky did not end up looking too dark. I also noticed that the horizon line was not straight, which is very important in a photo like this! But a quick rotation crop aligned to the horizon was able to resolve this.