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Some Clouds, some Sunlight - Queenstown to Christchurch


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G'day all,

I've been playing around with REX's Tim Fuchs' great new ENB palette, Sunlight ENBPlus, trying to find the best balance of settings to suit me and my flying. The pics below are a series of a flight from Queenstown to Christchurch in NZSI, utilising real weather provided by the REX Weather Engine, where I tried a variety of different ENB adjustments. It was a great flight, flown real time and with ATC provided by my latest addition - Radar Contact - no idea why I waited this bloody long to get that addon, it's making all the difference at the moment.

As far as ENB goes, I'm having a love/hate relationship with it at the moment. I love the extra contrast and bloom provided, and the ability to tweak the light colouration, but it is the source of many crash problems with FSX for me when flying with really heavy load on the CPU (ie - NGX + Brisbane). Consequently, I'm only really running with ENB enabled when I want really nice visuals for screenies. As far as the palette goes, I found Tim's profile to be a little heavy on the yellow, so over the course of this flight I tried a few variations. That's one of the great things about the ENB mod - you can turn it off within FSX, make some changes to the files then re-enable it to see your changes straight away. By the end of the flight, I'd toned down the colour saturation in the palette file to about 25% of Tim's original, and I'm pretty satisfied with my results now. This is of course, highly subjective - it will depend on the sky theme chosen, the weather, the time of day and your own personal preference, naturally. Please feel free to critique...

Anyway... on with the show Posted Image

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Takeoff from Queenstown - nice and sunny, should be a great flight!

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ENB on with Tim's settings, looked too yellow to me on my system. Nice clouds though!

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Cruising along at 15,000'

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ENB off to make changes, notice how dull the colours and shading look without it!

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Made some adjustments, toned down the yellow quite a bit and added some darkening to the .ini file. Maybe a bit too much. Sky is nice and vibrant, the clouds still look a touch yellow.

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Ah, that's better. Colour balance looks about right to me. Weather's thickening up ahead, gonna get a chance to see how these settings work out when it's gloomy too Posted Image

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Ooooh, some nice overcast conditions forming up as I approach Christchurch

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Looking back over the airport as I get vectored for an ILS approach into runway 20. Liking the contrast when looking towards the sun here - bright sky, dark cabin. Christchurch looks amazing up close :)

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Sky, terrain and weather looking fantastic, but I think I've gone a bit overboard on the darkening amount - the plane probably shouldn't be that dark.

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Nice even cloudbase at 3,000' as I set up for the approach

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Probably my favourite shot - happy with the colours, the contrast, and the amount of darkening added to the shady areas.

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Same pic from a different angle. Think I'll keep these settings for a while.

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Turning towards the ILS track

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Flaps deploying and slowing down on approach. Nice hazy effect.

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Short final and the end of my set.

As always guys, let me know what you think - I'm always trying to improve my pics!

Cheers,

Derek

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