here's the one i did using the noise reduction filter you just told us about. i didn't do the other postwork on it. what i like about it is i really can't tell that there's a loss of quality in the duck's feather when i used this noise reduction over the entire image (used full suppression BTW). can you guys tell any difference in the noise? anything to save me time is good! using that selection tool thingy takes time. if i can get away with having to do that, that's nice. :) wish i had known about this before. i would have saved myself a LOT of time reducing noise in this image! thanks a bunch for sharing this, Richard. Hope you don't mind i did this experiment here! :)