Thanks Gary.
canonloader wrote in post #3248019
I use the same thing. I'll give his tutorials a try. What I've been doing is to run a big brush over the whole image with the Blur Tool set to about 20%, then either sharpen the color channels with Sharpen Edges our just use USM to bring it back. It works pretty good for less than 100% crops and it's fast, but nothing as good as your getting. Thanks.

I use the blur(smart or gaussian) but not the whole image, rather, I use the magic wand to selectively blur the bg first. The process can be simple as one time pass(if the bg has one color or the whole image has a uniform bg) or could be many passes. #2 for example is a two-pass blurr process but #1 and #3 required several passes on each color layer. After taking care of the bg, I then select the image and do a noise reduction. Finally, I would sharpen the edges. After these processes, I would then make the curve, level, saturation, & contrast adjustments. Btw, I always use the 50% view.