In full disclosure, the last thing I did post-wise was to apply a mild HDR treatment to pop the aircraft a little.
The one thing I did not expect was how that HDR changed the overall sky. The original sky seemed to be the same uniform blue as what you see over the vertical tails of the Raptor.
What the HDR did was to unveil and pop those white clouds behind the Mustang just enough which added some needed contrast to the sky. Interesting side-effect.

Yep, nothing beats a classic.

Thank you.

Yeah, in a way it looks like I came full-circle back to the original. For a web-application, it looks close.

But when you process it with the intention of printing large-format, the little things that do not make much difference at the jpeg-level of 2500pxl on the long-side; get amplified significantly when considering that my long-panoramics of 72" x 24", now run to 455 megs as a tiff that are uploaded to the lab.

Here is a 6ft. stitched acrylic panoramic of a sunrise from the top of Cadillac Mtn in Acadia as the center-piece of my art show display taken with a D800. The lab told me of a couple artifacts that had crept-in and they suggested I rework it to eliminate them. Best advice I could receive.

The needles and leaves on bushes and trees in the foreground can be individually counted. That much detail is present. Plus you can discern the clothing on the people standing over to the right. At an art show where I showed this piece the first time, a man came up to it and looked closely at the harbor mooring area just off Bar Harbor and pointed-out his lobster boat to his daughter.

That being said, I am not convinced that an AI program could or should be applied to this image. I went old-school on this one. At least as what "old-school" was in 2018.

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Thank you for the offer. I also have printing capability and boxes of 13 inch Red River paper at the ready. Maybe too many. I'm pleased you thought that highly of it.
I sell my images as wall-mounted pieces in art shows and could possibly see this as a 40x25 glossy aluminum panel print, ready to hang. It just needs more tweaking to pass the smell-test as you get that large and you stand in front of it and pixel-peep it right there in the comfort of your home.

Yeah, it shows great promise. It may become my default post process from now on. "Happier than a puppy with two peters."

Probably Sharpening in the beginning would amply any noise present in the original file? Makes sense to use it last.

Yeah, it prompted me about the tutorials when I first launched the apps.

I have had Topaz Gigapixel AI since it was first released and thought it made a marginal improvement when up-upsizing cropped images.

Recently Topaz has been trying to bait me with Sharpen AI and DeNoise AI. So I took the bait last night. The price of admission being about $130. I also got the new version of Gigapixel.

I took an early effort from 2010 taken with a 6 mpxl D70s (my first DSLR). Time exposure of a lightening storm in the distance over Baxter State Park not far from where I live.

The first image is the tiff from my original efforts at post back then. The basic work flow starts with creating a tiff of the raw file in Photoshop, then putting that through Sharpen and then finishing it off with Denoise and back to Photoshop for final touches and printing if so desired.

As you can see, there are marked changes all along the way. The clouds are heavily mottled in the 2nd image with artifacts from over-sharpening and significant noise present in the trees in the foreground. The third image shows a marked tamping down of that effect in the clouds but the detail in the foreground is smudged out somewhat excessively in my opinion with Denoise-AI. Foreground "Bokeh"?

The AI also choose to replace gradients in the cloud cover on the lower left and just over Mt. Katahdin with what looks like creases you would see if you folded a sheet of paper. I did apply the Spot Healing Brush tool in Photoshop as an afterthought and it pretty much smoothed this out.

Final thoughts -
I am overall impressed with what it did with this relatively lower-rez image from essentially a 1st or 2nd generation DX sensor.

The software imports a data base reference library of images it uses to "learn" your images.

The software is big and it requires a lot of processing power. When the image is being processed and saved, the fans in the GPU and the box spool-up and you are treated to that noise for the 5+ minutes it takes to finish. My system is a Dell dual-Xeon machine with 96 gig of ram.
You can then save the file to a directory of your choosing and import the newly labeled file into Photoshop and continue on.

Used judiciously, this has great potential. Obviously I have a lot left to learn about them. And to see how it works with files from my D700, D800 or D850. Maybe even throw a D995 file at it. I just let it take the image and work it with it's default settings right out of the box.

I probably should give it a fairer test and see how it would handle this image if I went back to the original raw and started from there as I may have introduced some of these artifacts myself with my admittedly clumsy original post processing. You know?, "rookie mistakes."

Just added the final cropped image with the creases taken-out with the Spot Healing tool in Photoshop.

Side note - They also downloaded the program Topaz Photo AI. It would not install as my system does not support something called "AVX". So I just open the individual programs as I need them.

Interesting to know what you think.

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Thanks everyone. Glad you like it.

Great State Of Maine Air Show - Brunswick - 2015

D800 - Nikkor 70-300 VR f/4.5-5.6 f/13.0 1/640 ISO 400 Matrix Metering

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It is a nice camera. I had a D600 that Nikon swapped out the shutter mech under a recall.
Reviewers say that it is was lacking in the AF in dark conditions but I took a whole series of shots in the Holocaust Museum in DC. A very dark and moody exhibit. No flash. Used the focus-assist light to get a proper focus handheld. Very good results.
My son has it now.

Actually what is being cleaned is a protective filter that overlays the actual sensor. But that filter can be scratched as I learned on my D850 using a wet-swab system. Ruined a $300 bill to replace it.

Hunt's Photo out of Massachusetts might be worth a look. They recently advertised a mid-winter workshop for The Maine Woods around Mt. Katahdin and Baxter State Park.

My wife bought me a Boston Whaler from friends. Didn't even ask me. Boom. Did it.