Damien Symonds

Had a play: Let me know if you'd like to see the PSD file.

Do no - repeat, DO NOT - try to fix it. The banding will be catastrophic. Only replace it.

The solution I'm about to provide isn't perfect, I'm afraid. Some stripiness will remain. But it will be a heck of a lot better, and I hope you'll be satisfied with the improvement. First, duplicate the Background layer, and immediately run Filter>Noise>Despeckle. Then add a mask to that layer, but don't worry about masking anything yet. Then add a Channel Mixer adjustment layer, and immediately clip it (Ctrl Alt G) to the despeckled layer. Click the "Monochrome" button, then enter 0/80/20 for the three values (screenshot below). This will make the entire photo black-and-white, and importantly, remove all the worst striping from that area. Then return to the Despeckled layer, invert the mask to black, then zoom in and start carefully painting over the moire areas. Where you paint, you should see the worst of the little texture disappear, as well as the colour of course. Once you've done all that, evaluate how much you hate the stripes that remain. If you hate them badly enough, go to the Channel Mixer layer then add a new blank layer above it, and turn it into a dodge and burn layer (clip it to the others if you wish). The with a really low opacity brush, start dodging the worst of the remaining stripes, until your patience gives out and you run for the liquor cabinet. Can you show me how it turns out? Let me know if you have any problems following the instructions.

Yay! So the first step is to make sure there is no sharpening being applied to your raw file. In the Detail panel, make sure the Sharpening Amount slider is at 0; and also click on the blue link at the bottom of ACR to make sure sharpening is set to "none" there. Then process the raw file and bring it into Photoshop again, and take another 100% crop for me.

This is none of Adobe's business. It's a problem with your workflow, not for your workflow. If you want to take it up with someone, take it up with Microsoft. It's their program that can't see your files. I urge you to use Bridge for this purpose. Windows Viewer and other "dumb" programs can't handle the high-end stuff like this.

Well, that sounds like a dicey solution! Any trouble saving the PSD files? http://www.damiensymonds.net/2010/02/trash-those-jpegs.html

Well, it's having its own share of terrible problems too May I ask a bit more about your workflow? I mean, why on earth are you saving directly from raw to jpeg, anyway?

Are you saving to the internal hard drive when this happens? I smell Yosemite ...

That's wonderful news. Welcome to the light side

It looks to still be a tiny bit noisy, eg in the shadows under her chin?

No, still not right, sorry. Maybe you're using the Crop Tool instead of the Marquee Tool?

Yep, if in doubt, definitely err on the high side.

Hi Pat, I can definitely help with this. First, though, I need to know if you shot raw?

No, something went awry here. Can you read the 100% crop instructions again?

Would you be willing to allow me to use this photo to write a proper tutorial about freckle enhancement on my site? If so, could you send me the full-sized SOOR file? (saved as a jpeg). If not, that's ok.

Sorry, I can only give feedback in the classes.

You need to resize it first, the same way you would for any other web image. Go to the Image Size dialog and make sure the "Resample" checkbox is checked, then make it 1500pixels on the longest dimension. Then it will save well under the limit.

I see the problem on the TIFF file in Windows Viewer. This isn't actually a real problem. It's simply the result of a "dumb" program not being able to properly understand the layers created in a "smart" one. As long as you do all your browsing in Bridge, and of course never send TIFF files to clients, all is well.

There are several methods. Here's one I'm fond of: Duplicate the Background layer Go to Filter>Other>High Pass. Begin with the Radius at 0, and slowly take it up and find the sweet spot where the freckles are being exaggerated the most (the whole image will be grey at this point). As you play with the slider, you'll see that if you go too low, the freckles won't be getting their maximum punch, but if you go too high, the freckles won't be getting any additional punch, all you'll be doing is exaggerating other things. Find that sweet spot. After pressing OK to perform the High Pass filter, change the layer's blend mode to "Hard Light". Finally, add a mask to the layer and mask it to the freckled part of the face only. By the way, if you want an even stronger result, you can duplicate that High Pass layer. Heck, I suppose you could duplicate it as many times as you want, but it would start to look a bit weird. Oh, also by the way, you can use "Overlay" blend mode for a slightly gentler result than Hard Light gives. Here's my play with the above method:

I agree with Samantha.

Terrific! Now you can go to the folder of files, and move them to wherever you want them. Then browse them in Bridge, and edit.

The leap of faith

Everything looks absolutely fine at my end. Viewing in both Photoshop and Bridge, the PSD looks the same as the jpeg. Just downloading the Tiff now ...

How did it go?

I'm so sorry Julie, clean black-and-white processing is all covered in my Levels Class, so I can't share the methods here. I hope you understand. I hope you like this, though: