This picture was taken with an old digital, only 1 MP. It has a lot of noise. I don't like the background. To me, it looks like everything is clashing between the Orange and Mustard colors. Also, my face is full of red splotches. It looks wierd to me. The latest tool I've learned how to use is the Healing Brush so I used the Healing Brush and just changed the red pixels to the color of the other pixels in the face but I think it now looks washed out and a little unnaturally white. Here is the original picture, a middle-of-the-road one manipulate with Levels and Curves, and the washed-out white one. What might be the best tool/ approach for this problem picture?

Oops! I forgot to upload the images.

Could you post some larger versions, Anna? These are very small and really too tiny to see the imperfections you are talking about.

Hi AtlanaAnna,

Welcome to RetouchPRO! :pleased:

Agreed with everything Caitlin wrote .... It's nearly impossible to work on pictures slightly bigger than a postage stamp!!! :o:

Please, follow the second link under my signature for instructions about size and resolution for images to be attached to your posts .... ;)

I hope I did this right. I think I followed your directions on resizing an image.

I think the red blotches to me look like it is because the pixels in your picture have been enlarged too much and look alittle distorted, when Flora and Caitlin asked for a larger picture, i don't think they wanted you to enlarge it yourself from such a tiny picture.

I personally cannot work on a tiny image that looks distorted.

Do you have the original picture that you can once again scan?

The size of the first picture is 1.61cm by 1.63cm plus 300 dpi and its 21.6mb
that is too tiny for me or anyone else to work on.

For the forum you need to use 72dpi and for the picture to be at least 8 x 10 just less than 100mb in size.

Its something that we all got to get right, it took me ages to work that out, even now i mess up on the size and have to resize my work.

Hi Anna,

From what I can deduce from your original post, and the images you posted, I would guess that this is a crop taken from a 1M photo.

I would also guess that you are trying to blow up a figure who is not too large in the original. The problem you have, is that there are not enough pixels in the original image. Because of this, when you enlarge, you get a pixellated image.

There really is no way round this.

To enlarge, it is necessary to have sufficient pixels to render the picture in its new size, if not, then to achieve that size, each pixel has to be larger, and it is this enlargement of the pixels, that give the typical sawtooth edges and noisy image that you have.

If you are looking to get a large sharp focused picture from this image, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.

Thank you all for your input. Gary, you are right. The picture was taken with a 1 MP camera, I cropped it and enlarged it a little. I'm not sure the original will be fixable either but this has been very educational. I really appreciate everyone's help.

Hi AtlanaAnna,

As everybody said ... alas, nothing to do about the quality ....

For the colour I used a Hue&Saturation Adjustment Layer to fade yellows and reds ...