Digital BW, The Print

> From: marcsien77 [mailto:marcsien77@...]
>
> I would greatly appreciate advice on a PS technique to reduce grain
> from an almost uniform overcast sky area of a BW image.  The rest of
> the image is fine so I was thinking of doing something with a layer
> mask but so far I had no luck.  Many thanks in advance, Marc.

I generally begin with Select->Color Range to select all the sky, then use
other selection tools to get rid of any other pixels that may have been
inadvertently selected. Then I blur it. I've found that Smart Blur works
better than Gaussian Blur for one reason: even if you carefully select only
the sky, the Gaussian Blur algorithm will pull in some of the color from the
nearby pixels outside the selection area, which will discolor the edge of
the sky. Smart Blur doesn't do this. Unfortunately, in PS CS, Smart Blur is
one of the filters that they didn't get around to upgrading to 16 bits, and
indeed in 8-bit mode it can reduce the noise so much that you wind up with
visible posterization. Use sparingly.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...