I would imagine that like most everything I've found that seems new and amazing, the people who do this all the time will probably say. . ."oh yea, I've been using that for years", lol.
Making seasonal scenery tiles is not a simple task necessarily, it takes time and a good eye to change color channels around and tweak the bmp so that the coloration matches the area you want the new photoreal ground texture to reside. Well, I found this over on the FSDevelopers site. . .a plugin for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro mainly, called Metrix. Basically what you do is bring up the raw photoreal scenery, then load a template of the area that the scenery has to match (I used a top down image from FSX).
Now you highlite a good area of the template with a marquis outline, then do the same with the raw image. Now go back to the overhead shot, make sure it's active, open the Metrix plugin, have it analyze the image, when finished, move over to the raw image, make sure it's active, load the plugin again, tell it to apply and in seconds it will apply the color changes it analyzed from the template and convert the raw image to the same coloration.
This image may be hard to see, but the pic on the right is the template and the rectangular area to the left in the raw image is the area I had it revise. It was exact. Now it will still take a bit of tweaking, but this plugin eliminates the time it would normally take me to go back and forth from one image to another trying to get the color balance just right.
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