Grain or noise in a heavily processed sky

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1

This largely applies to B&W images where I am going for a lot of contrast in a sky (light clouds, darkened sky for example), I start to see grain/noise/pixels appear in the sky.

I was wondering what tools other than noise reduction people use to deal with this. Any neat tricks?

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What method are you using to convert your black and whites?

3

I am using a Photoshop B&W layer for the conversion, playing with the color sliders in that layer, then going on from there.

4

Harley, here is the general idea of how I try to deal with this issue. I do all of this in CaptureOne, but I’m sure that the same works in Photoshop.

  • I first adjust the image as a whole in terms of exposure, contrast, white balance, global color correction, saturation, etc. This also applies if I will be doing B&W - I go back and forth between color correction and color to b&w conversion until I get more or less where I want. I do not apply any sharpening at this stage. I also always try to apply no noise reduction whatsoever if I can get away with it, and as little as possible if I can’t.
  • I then create a layer mask for the sky, copy this mask to a second layer, and invert the mask in this second layer (my mnemonic is to call it “anti sky”).
  • I tweak the sky layer until I get noise down to where I’m happy. This usually involves a combination of noise reduction, contrast, clarity, structure, saturation and color correction. If there are clouds and all of this is not enough to preserve detail in the clouds while removing noise from the sky, then I create another filled layer for the entire image, adjust the clouds in this layer, invert the layer and apply it to the clouds with a very soft brush, refining the layer often as I go along, until I’m happy with the result.
  • Then I go to the anti sky and apply sharpening, tweak the contrast further, etc. etc. If some parts of the anti sky need additional work, then I create more filled layers, adjust those parts, invert the layer and apply with a soft brush, etc, etc. If there is plenty of detail in the anti-sky then my experience is that I can almost always get away without noise reduction in it, but this may be a question of taste. I’d rather take a bit if noise than noise reduction artifacts.

I hope this helps.

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5

Thanks, Alberto. I will give that a try (assuming I can figure out all the steps). I very much appreciate the response!

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