This is the "Experimental Aircraft Association's" B-17 called "Aluminum Overcast" as seen from the aft. Taken at the Georgetown, TX Municipal Airport.

For this shot I processed it with 3 bracketed shots with -2, 0, +2 EV in Photomatix. I then opened it up in Photoshop CS4 and used the Nik Color Efex 3.0 plugin on it. I used tonal contrast at about 60% opacity, pro contrast around 10% opacity, and bleach bypass at about 67%. All of these opacity levels are approximate.

After that I sharpened it with Nik Sharpener and cleaned it up with Imagenomic's Noiseware.

This really gives the shot that painterly look, but sometimes I think it may look a little too over processed. I like the look that it achieves, but sometimes think some of the detail gets lost. Overall I'm happy with the results though.

Sometime I will process a shot and put down the exact steps of how I get there since this is sort of from memory. Anyway, this gives you somewhat of an idea how I get the shots I get.