Retouching photos for a background?

[pierrot]

I'm stuck with this problem: I got excellent hi-res ground photographs from VE and use them to replace the default ground at my favorite airport (using Sbuilder X).
The problem is that the FSX scenery airport vectors (rways, buildings etc) are a bit off: objects misplaced by a couple of meters, rways or taxiways a bit too narrow to "mask" the underlying hi-res real ground etc.
So I guess that, for such minor corrections, I could better work it out with Photoshop, instead of redesigning the entire airport.

But how to do to replace the downloaded picture in Sbuilder with the corrected one? And how to be sure that my modified/photoshopped ground image will be placed at the exact same coordinates/location?

Also I understand that it is possible to create blending masks and masks for water ponds etc. in a TIF format, but how to combine them with the global (back)ground image? I read "tutorials" that talk about it but without explaining how to use the SDK utilities or invoke the EXE...

I'm lost, help ! ;)

[scruffyduck]

Well it is probably not that difficult to move the airport runways etc to match the photo scenery if you can use it as a background image for a tool like AFX, FSX Planner or Airport Design Editor.

[pierrot]

Yes for sure but the whole airport is rather large and complex, so I'd preferred to tweak the underlying photoreal bckgnd.

So my firts concern is to be sure (once I'll have retouched the ground image) that it will be included in the exact right position. A geotiff includes the position tags, but how to do after photoshopping the BMP backgnd created by SbuiderX?

[scruffyduck]

OK I'm not sure I can help with that one. Generally I work my airports to the background image rather than the other way around since I find it easier.

[scott967]

There is a good tutorial by Luis Féliz-Tirado on doing this.

Use the "create map from background" menu to create a .bmp file if you haven't already.

If you keep the map file dimensions (pixels) the same in photoshop, you can edit it all you want then save with the same name, and SBX will pick it up fine (so will ADE for that matter). You can create your blends / water map in photoshop, again using the same pixel dimension, and
save as 8-bit tiff and append _B and / or _W viz:

original image - L17X132735X132743Y90177Y90183.BMP
blend mask - L17X132735X132743Y90177Y90183_B.TIF
water mask - L17X132735X132743Y90177Y90183_W.TIF

SBX will use all 3 as input to resample.

scott s.
.

[pierrot]

Oh it seems that this is the precision I was missing: I have read the tutorial(s) but didn't notice the file naming and bit depth rules.
I'm gonna try that right away, thanks a lot! ;)

Btw if someone could explain me why SbuilderX cries its mother each time it starts, stating "Could not find/process the file: FSX_blablablah...txt" despite the fact that the LibObjectsPath is correct in Sbuilder.ini?