Messing with the hue lightness and saturation of the color channels does help a lot, but only with smoothing out the COLOR and even then, only the yellows seemed to provide results worth a damn. The image in motion is still super grainy afterwards. My suspicion is that, yes, Mike probably masked around certain areas while adjusting the color of the blobs to make it more smooth on balance; I did manage to get slightly better results masking around the sky and doing the same thing. I think following doing this to each of his sources, the difference between the splotches on each source became so different that his tool ended up scrubbing out A LOT if not all of the remaining splotches and thick grain.

That’s just my suspicion after experimenting a bit with the method.

Williarob, I’m pretty busy lately, hence my comparative lack of activity on the forums recently, but if I can find the time I can make u a video walking through what I did, but it’s pretty simple and basically a matter of messing with the hue, lightness, and saturation of the yellows until it looks better on balance.