airkas1 wrote:Hi beetle,
You are correct that there was no personal message attached to the rejection. Most likely the screener forgot, sorry for that.
Seeing your second rejected image for the first time now and it's indeed high in frame. The fuselage is center, but the tail/wing needs to be taken into account as well. Centering is not an exact science, but more of how it looks. Right now, there's a lot more 'dead' space below the fuselage than there is above it. I'm not seeing the compression, but the blurryness is visible to me, mostly in the forward half of the fuselage. The type of blurryness/very very soft parts of the image leads me to think that heathaze is a likely culprit. As such, it would have nothing to do with your workflow in Photoshop (which seems fine the way I read it).
Thank you for your answer!
No problem on the personal message, had me looking everywhere, searching Google to see what I was missing lol, I thought maybe it meant there was some type of "personal message" in the photo
The high in frame is not a problem, easily corrected. I wasn't sure, it looked odd to me but another photographer told me "use only the fuselage don't use any parts sticking out of it for centering up/down" I guess that'll teach me to listen to other photographers :p
Now for the bluryness, I am still confused, is there a way you could help me on this as I do not see this heat haze effect on the picture but then again I am not a screener and my eyes are not trained for it.
What I usually do when selecting the picture to edit is to look at several parts of the picture for sharpness, on this airplane I looked at the front, I can see the AOA probe mounting screws, I looked at the back and I can see individual stars on the American flag, all shaped the same, and I can see rivets/hardware on various parts of the airplane, so I thought this was a good candidate.
Here is an extreme close up of the AOA probe (it's low quality because, well, it is an extreme close up lol):

More realistically this is a front about 100% crop:

And this is an example of what I thought heat haze was, to my untrained eye:

So I guess my question is, what should I be looking for that are tell tale signs of heat haze?
Thank you again!