According to the article, the "colors ... are, importantly, not added for dramatic effect — these photos and all aspects of them, are real."
What processing are you referring to?
What processing are you referring to?
Especially in the ground pictures, a lot of work was done on the global/local contrast to achieve detail across the brightness range. In addition, manually brightening and darkening some of the areas to guide the eye. These are things photographers have always done since the early days of photography - however with modern tools, it's easier to achieve a look that goes too far, and starts coming off as "synthetic" or "video-gamey".
I also think they just did a swap of the sky in some of the dramatic cloudy shots.
an example of the postprocessing can be seen in the first photo, where the yellow painted flight line is glowing in the dark