One of the realities of photography is that you don’t always get to control the weather when you go out shooting. We plan and plan and plan for the optimal times but even then it doesn’t always matter. When you start trying to schedule air to air shoots along with the weather and light it gets even more complicated. This is when the computer comes in handy.
When flying through smog trying to get through to the good skies you can either put the camera down or keep shooting. Thanks to a handy little tool in Nik Color Efex Pro called detail extractor, it becomes really easy to bring out that background info. With the three sliders making it able to bring out the detail, contrast and saturation you can make that area pop without hurting the image. Just remember that when you apply the filter that it is a global change and if you don’t want to affect the plane the you need to select only the background and make a mask.