getting a handle on noise

I am seeing some noise in the cloud shadow areas. The exposure for the clouds is in zone 7-9 and I did some contrast correction. Should I be blending in the clouds exposed at a lower zone and push the highs instead of lows?

Here is what the noise looks like and I am wondering how to go about fixing it.
Thanks in advance.

noise in clouds (100% hard core pixel peepin' (and it matters to me))

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

Looks like most of your shadow areas are blocked up pretty good so I'd say you could have shot this with about a stop to a stop and a half more exposure and then pulled the highlights back some which would have helped with the noise floor.

Interesting point Jay. I certainly have plenty of range in the raw file. I've been using a split contrast technique from a single exposure and I am wondering if I should go the full mile and use multiple exposures that are adjusted before contrast expansion takes place. I will do some experimenting.

Color noise is what stands out to me. There's a trick with LAB that works great for almost completely eliminating color noise, but if you're printing I'm not sure it's the best option.

Save an original and a copy, convert the copy to LAB, jump a new layer, and go to the channels. You can slightly blur the a and b channels separately, watching the results to only target noise spots (which are hard to see). Once you've done that, you can flatten the image and convert to RGB (or whatever you're using). Then drop it on top of the original and change the blend mode to color. The image will retain the original luminance (no luminance noise is corrected), but the color is smoothed out.

Sorry if it doesn't help your situation, but maybe somebody will benefit

emomophantom wrote in post #10041040
Color noise is what stands out to me. There's a trick with LAB that works great for almost completely eliminating color noise, but if you're printing I'm not sure it's the best option.

<SNIP>

Cool formula! Will have to check it out...

Thanks for the tip emomophantom ... I will give that a try. I heard about using lab to clean up noise and then switching back for printing. It turns out I had no noise filtering on in DPP and I wasn't getting the widest data set for the sky from the capture. I printed 2 copies of raw based on each element and blended and the noise is gone but I'm having some issues getting a mask that has no halos at the sky / land boundary. For some reason the mask seems to produce a sharpening edge and I know the halo is there. I can see it. Others might not.

emomophantom wrote in post #10041040
Save an original and a copy, convert the copy to LAB, jump a new layer, and go to the channels. You can slightly blur the a and b channels separately, watching the results to only target noise spots (which are hard to see). Once you've done that, you can flatten the image and convert to RGB (or whatever you're using). Then drop it on top of the original and change the blend mode to color. The image will retain the original luminance (no luminance noise is corrected), but the color is smoothed out.

This seems unnecessarily complex to me. I've always simply duplicated the layer, changed the blend mode to Color, then blurred.

Wow another cool technique to try ... thanks everyone ... Joe