answered BUG REPORT - Oregon HD - Oregon/Idaho-border tile color mismatch

[ristar]

Hi,

 

I was flying along the Oregon/Idaho boundary along Snake River (amazing scenery!)  and noticed what look like mismatching ortho tiles (at least in terms of color). The issue appears to continue to the north and south of where th e attached screenshots were taken. Map included in two screenshots to show location.

 

Thanks,

 

Ristar

[Paulvanharte]

South of Klamath Falls, photo scenery missing. 

[Paulvanharte]

Oops I believe this is the boundary between Oregon and California

[ristar]

I spotted the same thing at the Oregon/Washington border (see attached). I'm guessing it is no coincidence this occurs at or near the state borders? Possibly due to the available imagery  captured at different times of the year, as well as different color corrections (e.g. I noticed some fields are green in Oregon, and brown in WA, or some mountains at similar elevations having a picturesque cap of snow in Idaho, but not in Oregon). Perhaps a hard issue to avoid if that is the case?

 

 

[FalconAF]

It's the nature of photoscenery.  Different companies taking the pictures may use different methods of taking the photos.  Also, one state's photos might have been taken in spring (nice green fields) and the adjoining state's photos were taken in autumn or during a drought (brown harvested fields, etc).  So "at the border" it looks really strange.  That's where "color correction" comes into play.  Whoever makes the photoscenery for our flight sims may (or may not) do color correction on the tiles that make up the scenery to try to blend it all together better.  But in extreme differences of the source data photos to start with at border areas, even color correction may not produce a totally eye-pleasing result.  And don't forget, there are THOUSANDS of individual photos per state, and it can take LOTS of time to color correct all of them. Sometimes it's just not practical or cost effective to try to do it.

[Jon Clarke]

@Tony Wroblewski Tony can you assist in determining whether the texture mismatch is something that could be looked at by the Devs for colour matching, or is it something we need to accept due to the different imagery available?

[Tony Wroblewski]

It's due to the fact that the different imagery for Idaho and Washington was taken 2 years after the Oregon imagery, and the later imagery is often a completely different colour. The only reason we included Idaho is because X-Plane's 1x1 degree tile system forced us to. However, I've noted this down as a bug.

 

 

 

 

[FalconAF]

The 1x1 degree X-Plane tile system also causes major problems in areas that usually have GREAT photoscenery sources too.  For instance...Las Vegas, NV.  In the 1x1 tiles, Las Vegas sits almost exactly at the center of where 4 separate tiles meet.  And because of the "classified" nature of the Air Force's "Area 51" to the northwest (actually, the entire Nevada Test Range which is HUGE), many of the free photo source sites have blurry low quality photos of that area AND the surrounding areas...in this case, Las Vegas.  And the color of those tiles can be horrendous.  One freeware Ortho4XP provider has the entire western half of Nevada from "Area 51" to the California border all the way from Las Vegas to Reno as bright orange in color.  It looks like a cartoon depiction of the eastern Arizona area on psychedelic drugs.  The tiles were downloaded from a public use source, but no color correction was made at all.  It's laughable to fly over those tiles and think you are getting anything close to "real" in the photoscenery depiction.  That's one of the reasons I was hoping ORBX would include the "extra" Lake Tahoe/Reno area Nevada tile in the Northern California product.  And the 4 files that make up the Las Vegas region in the future Southern California project too.  If anybody could make those tiles look respectable, I assumed it would be ORBX.