From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

965 Smoothing out raw detail to match JPEG

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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965 Smoothing out raw detail to match JPEG

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to smooth out the detail in a raw version of a photograph to match its JPEG counterpart. And so, what in the world am I talking about? Well, I'll go ahead and zoom in, let's say to 300%. And then I'll press and hold the H key. So keep that key down. And then click and hold in order to take advantage of the bird's eye view, which I could use to zoom in on the bird if I wanted to. But what I want to do is click and hold once again with that H key down, and drag this box over to the mountain top. And then, if I release, and then release the H key. Notice that I have a ton of digital noise up here in the sky and inside the rock, which is exhibiting a lot of colored noise as well. And so, if I were to go over to the layers panel and turn off that raw layer, you can see that the JPEG version of the photograph is way smoother. In fact, I think a little bit overly smooth, frankly. However, I do need to match that, if I want the overall composition to look its very best. And so, I'll go ahead and turn that raw layer back on. And I'll double click it's thumbnail in order to open that raw smart object inside camera raw. And now, I'll just go ahead and scroll down the list. And I'll expand the detail panel. Now, the sharpening value's just fine. However, I want to take that noise reduction value all the way up to 80. And just so we can see what I've done, I'll go ahead and zoom in on that sky just by clicking. And I'm actually going to zoom in a little bit farther by scrubbing to the right like so. And I want to be able to see what noise remains. And so here we are looking at a closeup of that mountaintop. If I were to press control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo that change to the noise reduction value, I'll bring back all that digital noise. And then, if I take that value back up to 80, you can see that a lot of the noise disappears. We do have some artifacting however. And so, I'm going to twirl open noise reduction so I can see this detailed value. And I'm going to take it down to 20. Now, normally you wouldn't want to do that. However, in our case, it's not really that much detail that we need to retain. After all, this is the background of the image, not the foreground. All right. Now, I'm going to crank up the noise reduction value by pressing the Tab key a couple of times to select it. And then I'll take that value up to 50. Now, not sure if you can make it out in the video. You'll be able to, if you're working along with me. We still have some big color modeling inside the face of the rock. And so, I'll twirl that setting open. And then, I'll click in the smoothness value right there. And I'll take it up to 80, which is going to give us some more uniform colors. At which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change. And it's a big one. This is before. You can see that we have a lot of noise. I hope it's holding up in the video. And this is after. And as a result, our background is better matching the smoothness of the penguins here in the foreground. And that's how you smooth out the detail in a raw version of a photograph to better match its JPEG counterpart, here inside Photoshop.

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