Smooth out blue skies

A result of the digital photo age is that blue skies and dark areas of photos end up looking very speckled and noisy. The smooth blue sky you see with your eyes is difficult to duplicate digitally. With my 35mm prints that was never an issue. The example below illustrates what I mean. If you look at the sky you can see the small speckles and spots. Using dust and scratch removal will not help and noise reduction won’t either.

There is a way to remove those speckles and it is to apply a gradient to specific areas of the photo. In Photoshop it begins by using the magic wand to select the specific area to be corrected. Once it is selected set the feather to 10 pixels. Next use the gradient tool with the foreground to transparent option to insert the shade and color of blue sky that you want. The end result is an amazing picture with smooth blue skies.

Impressive right? In case you are curious it is a photo of Devil’s Bridge in Antigua, WI.

This is an old photo from at least the early 1970s that looked old and torn originally. It has been restored and refreshed to remove stains and tears from the original. The before photo is on the right and the after photo is on the left.

The process involved removing evidence of the tear, patching the wrinkles and white spots out of the picture and removing the old, stained border. Now this picture is ready to be reprinted and shared with family.

That is too often times heard when taking pictures. Perfectly okay in its own right but sometimes does not do justice to the subject. A smile, although pleasant, changes the person’s natural features quite a bit. In some ways it obscures the natural lines in the person’s face. If you have had your fill of “say cheese” then do what I do, which is to just not use the phrase and tell the person specifically that you want their natural expression and faces.

Girl looking up at the camera (not smiling)

Especially in children, they are so programmed to smile that often I find that once I put them in front of the camera they automatically smile. I then have to direct them to be natural, which takes some work by them . It is almost a Pavlovian response today to see a camera pointed at you to smile. Once they get the hang of not smiling then the photo shoot can begin.


Having the subject not smile means that I can get a lot of off center shots of their faces that are highly expressive. This opens the door to high and low angle shots, shots offset to the right or left and creative lighting, even on toddlers and babies. The result are these very interesting and fascinating photos of faces that make you keep looking for more.