As we were on our way back home to Canada from our winter in South Texas, and as we were entering South Dakota, I looked out my side window and saw something I had never seen before.

All of these many jet contrails criss-crossing the sky were at first beautiful to me. After I gaped at them for a few seconds, and shot my photo, I said to hubs, “I sure hope those are from an air show or an airforce exercise, because if they’re not, I don’t think I’ll ever fly again!” My next thought was about pollution so of course, I researched that after returning home and learned that the jet contrails do indeed contribute to air pollution. The problem is that it’s difficult to measure how much.

Yesterday I was reading about a photo editing process that can be done right in the iPhone native photos app. I gave it a try for my feature photo and was pleased and surprised at the result.

I first took the photo into the Touch Retouch app to remove the distracting telephone lines and the tops of the buildings and trees from the bottom of the photo. I wanted only the sky in the photo. The only other edit I did was the process I read about yesterday. This was the original:

I was amazed at how the editing process brought out the true colours of the sky vs how my phone camera captured it through our slightly tinted motorhome window.

The interesting thing about the process is that you can apply the exact same settings to any photo to improve it.

I’ll dedicate tomorrow’s post to those settings.

“The short answer to the question ‘Are contrails bad for the environment?’ is yes. However, in the complex world of the upper atmosphere, there are caveats. Their impact depends on a host of conditions including weather, time of day, and altitude

Dr. Robert Sausen