Photoshop Discoveries 1

I stumbled across a very effective technique tonight.  But first a little background.  The image I was working on was a 4 photo HDR shot.  I processed each of the four first in DXO, then LR and finally Photomatix.  The first pass resulted in a sky that was very strange.  The word that best describes it is ‘posterization.’  No other area of the image had this problem, just the sky.  Where it transitioned from a darker blue to a lighter hue the transition was splotchy and pixelated. 

The first thing I did was return to LR to see what I could do with it.  By making sure all four images had the same color temperature and adjusting a couple of tonal ranges I was able to eliminate the problem – mostly.  Now it was confined to just a small corner that was behind some bare twigs of a foreground tree.  But it was still there.

The first solution that came to mind was to use the clone stamp.  And that worked well when I wasn’t in the transition zone.  In the transition zone I tried using the spot healing brush but that was too unpredictable.

Then I hit on the solution – the blur tool.  I magnified the image to 400% and started running the blur tool over the posterized area.  It really worked.  It smothed the tones as I hoped.  Furthermore, I could use it on the halos left by the sharpening that DXO applied.  One didn’t have to be so careful, especially at 400% enlargement.  If you ran over into the twig a little it blurred it but, unlike clone stamp, it didn’t take it out.

Now, this works fine for sky where there is no detail.  But wouldn’t work in any area that had detail.  But for this kind of situation, this is definitely a technique I want to remember.

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Author: doinlight

Ralph Nordstrom is an award-winning fine art landscape photographer and educator. He lives in Southern California and leads photography workshops throughout the Western United States. View all posts by doinlight