ISO 1600 - cleaning up the sky

<p> On a recent trip to Iran I accidently had the ISO set at 1600 for a couple of days. The indoor photos aren't bad but on outdoor images with lots of blue sky, the sky looks horrible. I welcome suggestions on how I might remove the noise or whatever it is that afflicts the sky. An example appears below. thanks</p>

<p>here is the photo</p><div></div>

<p>Dear Gunga, I don't think it looks that bad, but it depends on what you want to do with it, and what you want to use it for. If you have PhotoShop, try Select | Color Range, and click in the sky area. Then move the slider bar until you have basically the sky highlighted. Use the eye dropper to select the lightest area of the sky and darkest area of the sky for the other color. Then use the Gradient tool and place the first point one the darkest or lightest area, and go to the opposite value. It will give you a perfect gradient from your lighter sky color to the darker one. Then you next issue is whether it looks natural, so I would probably add some noise to the area to mimick the rest of the image. Another tool, like Nik Software might be a better solution, but it depends on what you have.</p>

<p>And stay safe on your journeys.</p><div></div>

<p>you can do a layer mask, and lighten the image, and then soft light the lighten image over the layer mask. Here was a 10 minute attempt.<br>

<a href="http://www.gregfina.com/photo.net/00SZMJ-111551684.psd">Update Image in PSD (162MB)</a><br>

<a href="http://www.gregfina.com/photo.net/00SZMJ-111551684.jpg">Update Image in JPG (10MB)</a></p>

<p>The last step if you wanted to remove noise would be to run Noise Ninja over the image.</p>

<p>You didn't mention what software you have at your disposal, but presuming you have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, the following method works for me when the selection is easy as in this case.<br>

Do a selection of just the sky. Put this selection on it's own layer (Ctrl J in Photoshop). Then use Filter/Noise/Reduce Noise and apply these settings:<br>

Strength 5 - 10<br>

Preserve Details 45%<br>

Reduce Color Noise 45%<br>

Sharpen details 0%<br>

Remove JPeg Artifacts<br>

Follow this up with 1 - 2 pixels of Gausian Blur on the layer</p>