My GPS Camera Phone

Yesterday, I posted a shot of the moon rising into a deep blue evening sky. It was reminiscent of some NASA photos I’ve seen where the blue sky turns to interstellar black. Now I’m here to tell you that what I posted was only part of the story – in other words, it really wasn’t a good photo at all. However, the magic of Photoshop allows you to make something out of nothing.

The source image was a whole lot more than a sky and moon. In fact, it was a parking lot (with a sky and moon):

Though I took the photo because I thought the sky was nice, the rest of it could stand to be eliminated. So that’s what I did. I selected a crop area that cut out everything that wasn’t sky, while still giving a decent placement to the moon:

The problem we have now is the noise generated by a low-quality, 2 mega-pixel camera phone. The file is saved as a JPG with high compression (to save space, I presume), which affects the overall quality of the photo. High compression produces poor color gradients and a pixellated look, so we need to eliminate this with a photo editing tool. Enter Photoshop magic.

As I posted recently, there’s a simple filter to smooth out gradients and reduce noise. This filter is appropriately named “Reduce Noise…” and can be found in the “Filter” menu under “Noise.” For this particular noise reduction, the settings I used were as follows:

• Strength: 10
• Preserve details: 0%
• Reduce color noise: 100%
• Sharpen details: 0%
• Remove JPEG artifact: checked

By using extreme settings, the color should smooth out nicely. You wouldn’t normally do this, but there’s no detail to preserve and we want the best smoothing possible before adjusting the levels. NOTE: Before applying the reduce noise filter, duplicate the background layer and switch off the new duplicate layer. You’ll need it later. Here’s the image with noise reduction applied:

Once the noise is worked out, we’ll add an adjustment layer to control the levels by going to “Layer->New adjustment layer->Levels…” Be sure that this layer is at the top. Adjust the settings to your liking. In my case, the blue becomes much more blue and the dark areas become almost black. Almost there:

Now wait, there was a moon in this image. What good is a noise reduction filter if it is going to blur everything out? Good question.

Remember that duplicate layer? Turn it on then outline the moon using the polygonal lasso or whatever you’re comfortable using. You will notice that the noise reduction didn’t apply to this layer because it wasn’t selected at the time, which means the moon is still visible. Once outlined, right-click (CMD-click in OS X) on the selection and the choose “Layer via copy.” Now the moon is resting on its own layer, hopefully above the noise reduced layer. You will know this immediately because the moon will suddenly be visible. Add a watermark and you’ve got a finished product:

High file compression is a given in the field camera phone photography, but I had not discovered a way to counter this efficiently, instead trying to manually reduce it through lighting and shot angles. Well thanks to the tutorial, “Reduce Noise in Photoshop CS3,” by Mike Rodriguez, I discovered a goldmine in the world of Photoshop.

The image above was taken some time ago (during Negative Week in August 2008), but it didn’t make the cut because of massive amounts of noise in the darker colored areas. Well, here it is now, cleaned up and much better for it. All this photo needed was a good dose of the “Reduce Noise” filter, a standard filter in the “Filter->Noise…” menu. I think I never noticed it because “Noise” implies making it, not taking it away. Now I know.

Give it a try and you’ll see how incredible this filter is. After viewing Mike’s tutorial, be sure to check out the rest of the detailed tutorials on the Layers Magazine site. They’re thorough, easy-to-follow and worth a look.