Digital BW, The Print

for skies, a median filter is sometimes appropriate...

mark

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Paul D. 
DeRocco" <pderocco@i...> wrote:
> > From: marcsien77 [mailto:marcsien77@y...]
> >
> > 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@i...