Above the Everglades in Painters Light

Taken with the cell phone while flying over the southern tip of Florida.

The original image of this, was retrieved from the recycle bin several times, due to it's many flaws. - Shooting out of a jet airliner window is always a roll of the dice.

The original had veiling reflections, glare and haze from the
plexi-glass, covering the aircraft window.
Shooting directly into the sun, the cell phone's image sensor matrix, became apparent, with loads of gridded, digital noise.
Then, there was the pesky, horizontal stabilizer, from the tail of the airplane, sticking out of the upper-right corner of the frame. The tail section of the plane, extended part-way into to the triangular cloud.
- Whichever engineer placed the rear wing of the aircraft within my field of view, out the window, was an idiot. LOL :) !

After for sitting for seven months in my " Working Projects" folder, I returned to the image. I liked the overall feel to it, due to its composition and great colors. I decided it was finally time to do something, with this poor image of mine.

Most of my posted photos are pretty straight forward, I usually don't do much to enhance them, other than curves or tone mapping.
In order to save this one, I knew I was gonna have to get creative and go "Artsy" to hide the imperfections. - I had never been this extreme before in manipulating an image that I cared about, so this was going to be new territory for me.

I first added Gaussian Blur to cover up random digital noise and reduce the matrix a bit. Then I added lots of Noise and Grain so they were in evenly distributed - uniform and controllable amounts.
Next, I used Unsharp Mask to bring out the detail in the clouds and water. I used levels in selected areas to help reduce window haze, glare and veiling reflections.
I cloned out the wing tip, using the surrounding sky, which I should have done at the beginning... LOL :).... The cloning disrupted the noise field I created, and was a bloody nightmare to clean up. I almost gave up and started over.
Lastly, I added a fine weave, under "Textures ", with a high transparency setting, this further hid the sensor matrix and gave a canvas-like feel to the image.

The end result looks like a painted canvas, or, so I think. Any tips or critiques on this digital manipulation would be welcomed.

Anyway.... I'm glad this one didn't get deleted, as it almost did several times.
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