All right gang, we have come a long way in
terms of making our image more
menacing, more malignant, which is a good
thing, of course in our case.
But we
have also brought out a lot of colored noise.
So if I go ahead and zoom into
the top of the image, so that's where you
really see it.
We are not seeing it
so much down below, because up here towards
the top is where we have done the most damage.
We have applied the most modifications that
is to say, and the more you modify an
image, the more you destroy its details, this
happens to be one of those
things.
And then you need to go in and repair the
details sometimes, as we do
in the case of this sky.
So notice, we have got this Digital Noise,
meaning we
have random variations between neighboring
pixels.
Most of our random
variations are in the color department but
some of our variations happen in the
brightness department as well.
So here's what we are going to do.
I am going to press Shift+Tab to bring up
my
Layers palette and I am going to make sure
the Background layer is active and I
want to apply a non-destructive filter to
this layer and the best way to do
that is to go up to the Layer menu, choose
Smart Objects and choose Convert to
Smart Object.
And Smart Objects are very powerful also quite
advanced.
But we
are going to take advantage of it because
it enables us to apply a filter and
then mask away the areas that we don't want
to modify.
I will go ahead and change this new layer,
which is now Smart Object, I will go
ahead and change its name to Stanley, since
that's what it is The Stanley Hotel
there.
Just so that we have enough room to work here,
I am going to move my
image up and to the left, just so I can see
as much of the sky detail as
possible because the filter that we are about
to choose brings up a really big dialog box.
All right, so I am going to go the Filter
menu, choose Noise and choose Reduce
Noise right here and this is a very powerful
feature inside the software.
Now
for starter's I am going to increase the Reduce
Color Noise value to a 100%.
Now we are not going to really see what we
are doing here inside of this
preview, because the original image doesn't
really appear to have any noise and
we are really not seeing that much noise inside
of this Background layer.
But when we see it in the context of the Adjustment
Layers and that Gradient
Moodiness layer and all that, that's when
we really see the color and noise
coming out.
So by virtue of the fact that I just took
that Color Noise value up
to a 100%, we have got rid of a lot of the
noise in the background.
So I want
you to keep your eye over here in this left
region.
If I turn the Preview check
box off this is the way the noise looked before,
this is the way it looks after
and hopefully you can perceive that.
I will go ahead and zoom in a little bit
more in just a moment but before I do I want
to change a couple of other values.
First of all, I don't want to sharpen any
details inside of this dialog.
So I
will take that value down to zero.
I am going to increase the Strength value,
which is the amount of brightness noise that
we are depleting, I will increase
this Brightness value up to 10, so we are
setting it to its maximum setting and
then I will take Preserve Details down to
10 as well.
So these happen to be the
best settings for this image.
Obliviously, each and every image requires
a
different manipulation.
I will go ahead and click OK in order to accept
that modification.
Now I will zoom in just so that we can really
see how there is very little on
the way of noise left.
So this is what that image looked like before,
if I just
press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on a Mac and this
what it looks like now.
So pretty
big difference where the Color Noise is concerned.
Now notice that we have gone ahead and added
this Smart Filter to this Stanley
layer and there it is, Reduce Noise.
I could double click on it to modify the
settings or I can click inside of this Filter
Mask right there and I definitely
want to do that because if I scroll down to
The Stanley Hotel itself and I were
to turn off this effect, notice how much crisper
the detail inside The Stanley
Hotel is before than it is after, if I turn
the effect back on.
So we have a
lot of color bleeding, a lot of problems.
So this effect that we have applied is good
for the sky but bad for the hotel.
So again, I am going to go ahead and click
in the Filter Mask in order to make
it active, then I am going to zoom out from
the image so that I can see more of
it at a time.
I am going to grab my Gradient tool once again
and I am drawing
not inside the image but inside this Filter
Mask and notice that my Foreground
to Background Colors are set to White as Foreground
and Black as Background.
I will change my Gradient to Foreground to
Background once again, and I am
going to drag from right about here downward
like so and I have got the Shift
key down once again so that I am constraining
the angle of my drag to exactly
vertical and then I will release and that
goes ahead and protects the building.
So this is before, let's go ahead and zoom
in on that building once again.
This
is the before version where the colors are
bleeding all over the place, this is
the after version with the crisper detail
and yet we are still getting rid of
the noise up there in the sky.
Thanks to a combination of a Smart Object,
a
Smart Filter, and a Filter Mask, all of which
you will learn more about much,
much later inside of part three of this series.
In the next exercise, we are going to bring
out more of the detail inside of
the image by sharpening it using a strangely
named but powerful filter called
Unsharp Mask.
Stay tuned.
