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Re: [Digital BW] Burning Skies (feathering)

2002-09-08 by Martin Wesley

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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

Re: [Digital BW] Burning Skies (feathering)

2002-09-09 by Carolyn Frayn

Rick wrote:
>> 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

Martin wrote:
> 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?)

I don't remember.. <gg>. To make smooth transitions now, I do what you're
suggesting, large - large brushes, they don't give that banding that
feathering/blurring marque selections are known for.  I would have moved to
PS7 for the brush sizes alone.

I usually create a curve adjustment layer, don't do any curve moves (it is
simply acting as a dup image layer), attach a layer mask,  choose multiply
blend mode and then with one large or various sized brushes (or wacomb pen
with variable pressures) paint the the mask to effect the areas of the image
you'd like. This gives me the smoothest transition to date. Then adjust your
opacity to suit your tastes.

Try two ways, keeping the large brush mostly off canvas, using only the edge
for the feather. Switch back to black, and paint inner areas where you want
to erase the effect.. you can achieve a very good smooth mask.

Or, with the layer mask filled with white, select black, and paint with the
largest brush you can inside the image, with a steady hand follow your edges
(or go off the canvas altogether if you're just after the corners), the edge
of the brush creates a good rounded smooth transition at the corners either
way, no banding.

You can also give the curves a tweak in multiply mode for different
strengths and effects.

sorry Rick, not much help here for earlier PS's.
Carolyn

Digital BW, The Print

Re: [Digital BW] Burning Skies (feathering)

Re: [Digital BW] Burning Skies (feathering)

Re: [Digital BW] Burning Skies (feathering)

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