I was excited to be flying over the Sahara, but every time I looked out the window, I didn't see very much.  I decided anyways to start taking some pictures and see what I could pull out of the pictures when I got home.

 

These images are hybrid- before/after of several images from this gallery.  The "Before" images are really what the scene looked like to the eye from the airplane.  The "After" images look like Mars pictures taken by a NASA spacecraft.  It is really surreal, the colors enhanced a bit, the detail vivid.

 

This is one of my favorites- you can barely see any except for the most obvious features.  Not only did enhancement bring those features into greater detail, but variations in color are amplified and you can see the effects of wind.  The obvious ones are the dune rivulets in the middle, but less obvious before were the dark, downwind patches that show a slow erosion of the darker rocky outcroppings, at the top left side of the picture.

 

And here, the details are much better as well, and the reddish color (Mars-like) more obvious.  The dark splotches are cloud shadows.

 

The enhancement was really simple- I simply used a tool called Photo Impact, and then only Version 4.0, which is very much out of date.  However, it was simple to use and I just told it to automatically adjust brightness and contrast, and this was the result.  For some reason, Adobe's Photoshop has never done a good job with automatic brightness and contrast.  Strange that such a good piece of software in nearly every other way is so deficient in such a basic task.