Smoothed Jersey Panorama
Posted by briandh on October 22, 2006
Taking the techniques I learned from smoothing my Menorcan night shots, I have improved (I think) my existing Jersey Panorama.
It wasn’t as simple as applying the exact same tricks since the panorama was taken at midday so was not suffering from the same level of graininess. Here the graininess was restricted mostly to the sky area. Attempting to use the salt-and-pepper filter on the whole image resulted in a significant loss of detail and sharpness all over.
I ended up doing it in the following stages:
- Use the Smart-edge selection tool to select just the sky. I chose to just include the sticking up lamp posts and strings of lights and sort them out afterwards – see later.
- Feather the selection outwards a little so that there was less of a noticeable edge to where the processing was applied.
- Apply much the same filters as the night time shots – salt-and-pepper, edge preserve smooth and gaussian blur.
- Invert the selection and muck about with the edge preserve smooth and gaussian blur to try and reduce the halo’s around some objects in the scene, and some speckling in the walls of buildings.
- Finally, I brought the original image in as a background and used a feathered circular eraser to get the original lamp posts and strings of lights back.
And that seems to have done the trick. Here is how the new image looks – to really see the difference you need to see the image (and the original) at their full size:
Pizza at St Brelades Bay – Smoothed Hosted on Zooomr
