The individual reddenings for B stars in two fields in the Small Magellanic Cloud ( SMC ) and two fields in the Large Magellanic Cloud ( LMC ) are determined by means of Strömgren uvby CCD photometry .
In both LMC fields we find a foreground reddening of E ( B - V ) = 0.085 \pm 0.02 , and for the SMC fields we find E ( B - V ) = 0.070 \pm 0.02 .
In addition to the foreground reddening we find contributions from reddening intrinsically in the Clouds up to E ( B - V ) \sim 0.21 .
The intrinsic contribution is not correlated with position within our \sim 6 \arcmin \times 4 \aas@@fstack { \prime } 5 CCD fields but varies in an essentially random way .
Unless the reddening is measured for a particular object , it will be uncertain by \pm 0.035 ( best case , far from the central bars ) to more than \pm 0.10 ( close to the central bars ) .

The Strömgren vby photometry has been used to derive metallicities for GK giant stars in the observed fields .
Adopting average reddenings we obtain mean metallicities which are consistent with those found from spectroscopic studies of F and G supergiants ( Westerlund [ 1997 ] ) , but with a considerable scatter in the derived metallicities , from [ Fe/H ] \approx - 2.0 to [ Fe/H ] \ga 0 .
A significant fraction of the scatter is , however , due to reddening variations rather than being intrinsic .
The possible existence of high metallicity stars should be investigated further using spectroscopic methods .