Digital BW, The Print

----- Original Message -----
From: "ricm95901" <rmurai@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2002 10:03 PM
Subject: [Digital BW] Burning Skies (feathering)


> Perhaps some of you can help with a PS problem that I've been
> trying to solve.
>
> I prefer to regularly feather corners/edges on practically all of my
> photos. I've been selecting with either a rectangular or oval
> selection, inverse, apply a 250 feather and repeat with another
> 100-150 feather and finally a curves adjustment layer.
>
> This works fine most of the time but whenever I have open,
> evenly illuminated areas, i.e. blank sky, calm water, I get a slight
> to horrendous posterization. It's very subtle on the monitor but
> evident on the output. I've tried combining two different selections
> to acheive a blended feather but that's not competely effective
> either. I've tried a burn/dodge layer mask/soft light/50% but the
> 999 pixel diameter brush just isn't big enough resulting in
> uneven burns.
>
> I'm scanning at 16 bit then to 8 bit and 70-90MB files.
>
> Any other ideas??


R.,

You have discovered that PS doesn't do very good gradients sometimes! I have
hit the same thing where I needed some very feathered selections in sky
areas.

Two suggestions. Try PS7 that has a 2500 pixel brush diameter. Or, courtesy
of Carolyn Frayn, save a copy of your file and reduce the resolution of the
copy by a very large amount keeping the size the same. Create your mask in
the low res copy with 0 feathering. Save the selection as an alpha channel
and deselect. Use Gaussian blur on the channel mask. Then res the copy back
up to the original resolution and copy the alpha mask to the original file.
This will give you a gradient spread over a much larger area of the image.
How smooth for your purposes I am not sure but worth a try. (Did I get that
right Carolyn?)

Martin Wesley