Hi,
I've been lurking a while and trying to learn more about retouching. I must say that there are a lot of experienced folks here!
Anyway I was faced with a challenge recently. I got an image that had a lot of noise in it. Now I don't know PS well enough to know if this can be done or not so I thought I would post it here and see. The image has a lot of blue and green noise in it. Is there anyway to clean it up that was not going to take many hours? Here is a section of it and here is a link to the actual big banana.
Thanks in advance for all thoughts and responses. Cheers!

Link to the Big File (http://roland.home.texas.net/2001/10000013.JPG)

1st, this is a lousy image, that I wouldn't try to save, but if I was held at gunpoint, I would do what I did. Now, to remember what the hey it was.
PSP7. Adjustment layer, color levels. reduced the yelly as much as possible. Dialed in lotsa blu. Did the adjust twice. Color replacer on the spots. Huge amount of soften on the sky.................

Hi Jonsien,
Welcome to Retouch Pro and glad you decided to delurk finally. I don't know if this will help you or not but I have had alot of sucess with this plugin. It's free to download and even though it says Demo it's the full version in Beta form. As a matter of fact, I don't think they have the full version for sale. It really does an excellent job with grain. It called Eye Fidelity Tools and you can find it here. (http://www.dvp.co.il/) It's free so it's definately worth a try.

You might also give this technique a try. Switch modes to Lab and apply a soft blur to the A and B channels. That blurs only the color info with out affecting the image detail. It works in situations where the noise is located in the color information. Some digital photography can result in this problem.
DJ

Hi jonsien,

First off, welcome to RetouchPRO! I'm glad you finally came out of hiding. :)

The problem with this picture is actually pretty easy to fix once you know how. It involves looking at the individual RGB channels and replacing the "damaged" one. I don't know how far along you are learning PS, so I'll start from the basics.

Click on the "Channels" tab (usually next to your Layers palette unless you've moved it.) You will most likely see the channel "RGB" highlighted. That means you are seeing the composite of all three channels at once. If you then click on each of the individual channel names, you'll be able to view each channel separately. Notice in this image that the blue channel contains almost all of the damage, i.e. the blue and yellow noise.

It is nearly impossible to repair this, so it is much easier just to replace it instead. I chose to replace the blue channel with the green channel. To do that, I clicked on the green channel to make it active. Then Ctl-A to Select All and Ctl-C to copy. Then click on the blue channel to make that one active and Ctl-V to paste. You have now just copied the green channel into the blue channel.

I worked on the entire image and it seemed to make the image look basically grayscale except for the red portions. I can't tell by looking at the original what the actual color should be or if it really is almost grayscale. In any case, I think it looks pretty cool! If you do need color somewhere, you might need to colorize those areas. (And if you need help with that, just ask.)

I've attached the before/after of the small portion you attached here so that you can see the result of the above procedure.

Very cool picture BTW! :)

Jeanie

Hi and Welcome to Retouch Pro...One thing you might consider is to turn this into a B/W. You might try this:
(1) select the channel tab in the layers palette
(2) click on the red channel
(3) press ; Ctrl+A ( selects the whole image)/ press Ctrl+C ( to copy it to the clipboard/
(4) Now click on the blue channel/ select the whole image (ctrl+a) then press Shift+Ctrl+V to copy the clipboard image into the selection
(5) click on the top (RGB) channel, press CTRL+D to deselect the image
(6) Click the LAYERS tab
(7) At the bottom of the tab is a little circle half black and half white. Click it. A menu will pop up. Select Channel mixer.
(8) An adjustment layer will appear in the layers palette and a control window will open. Put a check mark in the MONOCHROME box, then adjust the sliders to adjust your image tone and so on. When done just close and flatten...
Doing this will get rid of the noise etc and give you a very cool B/W photo...

Another thing you could do, if you have the plugin "BuzzPro", would be to apply simplifier one filter at a setting of around 500, go to EDIT>FADE BUZZPRO> select multiply blending mode and fade to around 60%....see attach....Good luck, and let us know how your project turns out!! Tom

Ok, heres the photo!! Sorry...my mind wandered out the gate again....

Jeaniesa, you did well, I don't know about the PS channels yet, but will try this.
thomasgeorge, yours looks very good too, but you said B&W in your text, the image is color.
You both got good results but did it a slightly diff way.
Verry interesting.

The posted photo was done using Buzz pro method which will preserve the color...I forgot to mention that...oops!!! Tom

That's a lot further than I managed to get. Great work everyone. I have one last avenue and am going to send the image to the guys at Asiva.com. I saw them at Macworld and they said that they specialized in color correction and image enhancement software, so we shall see how they do. They were showing some amazing corrections at their booth. If it's ok with everyone, I will send them the link to this thread and see if they can do anything with that picture. I will wait to see if there are any objections to this suggestion, before doing so.
Thanks again all, and have a great (and SAFE) weekend!

This is not the fastest method, but if you really want to save the pic, This is what I would do.... and I did a little VERY roughly on part of the picture....

First I adjusted the curves to lessen the contrast of the blue and green channels against each other, then created an empty layer for luminosity and for color. I used the surrounding color and luminosity to paint over the worst sections of the picture. This would require intricate masking of the plane, etc., which I did not do because I don't have much time, but you get the idea.

Hi jonsien!

:) Welcome to RP!
I might be late, but here is what I did to try restoring your picture:

1) I Run Brightness&Contrast on The Blue Channel, strongly decreasing both, to fade the damage.

2) I used Hue&Saturation to desaturate each colour cast.

3) I used the Curves to enhance the image a bit.

Being me, I also 'cleaned it up' a bit...and here is the result...

P.S. I work with PS7

jonsien, I don't see any problem with pointing the people at Asiva to this thread. In fact, I would be interested to see what they can do.

Flora, beautiful work as always! :)

Jeanie

Jonsien, welcome! The plane pic was not as difficult to fix as it may have appeared. The secret is to analyze the photo first. This pic was taken at night with only the runway lights and other local lighting. The sky should be black! Not multi-colored speckles, but nearly all BLACK, with possibly just a hint of slight coloration. And sure enough, when you overlay a corrected curves onto the original, that is what happens (details in next post).

Bottom line: The pic you got was over-corrected or over-exposed or over-compressed or possibly all three, and it could not possibly be accurate, so we proceed by putting the accuracy back in.

I am putting a close up of a small piece of the pic here, so that you can see how the pixels (still visible due to the overcompression/low resolution somewhere in the life of this pic) are no longer multi-colored confetti, but all the same tones. A full view version may be found by clicking below:

www.innographx.com/nightplane.jpg

Phyllis Stewart

Here is what I did.

1. Channels--copied red channel and made it second layer.

2. Curves*--on that layer, adjusted grays in the sky till they were much closer, closed it, then did it a second time till the sky became ALL ONE SHADE OF GRAY.

3. Autolevels--to balance the highs and lows, turning sky nearly black.

4. Set blend mode to overlay. The sky and plane had lost their colored speckles, but some remained on runway, so...

5. Duped top red channel layer, set blend mode on this new middle layer to color, then used "color balance" to add color to this all gray layer, making shadows more blue/magenta, midtones more cyan/green, and highlights more yellow. This evened out the color of the pixels in all areas.

6. On this same layer, used a brush to touch up colored areas like backpacks, uniform stripes, lights on plane, etc. with their colors of red and yellow.

7. Top layer--used dodge tool on big flaps by nose of plane, and along tops of wings to bring out detail lost in shadow (selected these areas with polygonal lasso first to get sharp edges).

*If you have any questions on how to adjust curves, there are good tutorials right here, or you can find them on the web.

Again, see the whole picture at www.innographx.com/nightplane.jpg and see a close up of one section right here (above post).

Phyllis
www.innographx.com

Colored Noise

adding to the above, try here:


http://www.ledet.com/margulis/ACT_postings/ACT-blurring.html

and here:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/PSTV_links.html

Stevens' site under Noise,grain and descreening.

I just took a quick look at the jpg. And if the orginal file is just as bad. Don't feel to bad if you have problems working it out. It's like a burger king hamburger. It's a whooper.
Try what's posted and those links though.

I couldn't resist putting in my two cents worth.

I ran the image through NeatImage. This removed most of the noise. Then, using Hue/Saturation/Lightness, I reduced the blue saturation until the balance of the noise was gone. I also reduced the yellow saturation to clean up the cement area.

The plane now looked too grey to me so I added a new layer with the blending mode set to color and filled it with blue. I then erased the blue cast from the cement area to get the result I wanted.

Jim

Full size inage here: http://home.att.net/~emma.non/Jet2.jpg

Nice job Jim. Amazing how many different approaches were taken to tackle this problem. If nothing else, jonsien has lots of options to try! :)

Jeanie

Hello all,
Compliments to those you that have attempted to correct that image. I must say some of the results are quite outstanding! After looking at the image it would seem that the two consistent things about the noise in the image were the Hue and the luminance values. As such in the Asiva Photo 16 bit application I was able to isolate the noisy areas and applied a black color to them at a blend rate of 88%, effectively 'disguising' the noise. It makes a big difference when you work in 16 bit because you effectively have 65,000 levels to work in as opposed to 256 in 8 bit.

The rest was just simply adjusting the brightness and then the saturation of the colors. Here is a link to a simple html file of a before/after of that image. This correction took me less than 10 minutes to do. No adjustment layers or masking was used.

If you require the full resolution output of that image file I will be more than glad to put it up. You will find that the actual large file is really very clean without any of the softness that you might find with 8 bit noise reduction systems.

http://www.asiva.org/Demo/fighter.htm

On 8 bit/16 bit images. You might want to check this out.


http://www.ledet.com/margulis/ACT_postings/ACT-8-bit-16-bit.html

In fact the new edition of his book, "Professional Photoshop"(the 4 th edition). He covers this subject on the 8/16 bit debate.

The method Aviso used is somewhat unclear to me. It worked nicely though, but looked too dark in the end. Getting rid of artifact is a hobby of mine and a fairly easy way (for advanced users) to accomplish pretty much the same thing is to build a duplicate blue channel mask and manipulate the duplicate with curves to bring out the mess of artifact as much as possible, without going overboard. Basically this will isolate the unwanted artifact that appears as blue in the rgb file. Then using this channel as a selection to fill in the areas of blue with the dark colour sampled from the background. (Once you've filled a new layer with this dark colour you have to change the blend mode to saturation.)
By playing with various channels you can further reduce the noise and, as Aviso said, camouflage the unwanted noise, which is great advice.
I wanted to upload a copy of the blue channel used in this process but it was so messy the file size was too big, so I cropped a portion of what the results look like using this method.
The masks used only take a couple seconds to make because all you're doing is duplicating channels and messing with them via curves. The only real difference between this and the aviso version is this has less contrast in the plane.
Mig

Had a little fun with this one myself... Basically, I used the channel ideas -- copygin the green channel into the noisy blue one. Then I went back and fooled around with the blue channel trying to bring a little more color back into the picture, but I was only mildly successful. Since it's such low light, it's no doubt any visible colors are washed out -- but I think that line of grass along the runway would look great if it had a nice dark green hue to it...

Oh well, the only thing I though the picture needed was the star field that obviously was there when you snapped the picture originally... I got kind of lazy, so I'm sure you can see where I dropped the clip files onto a new layer and then "erased" the jet back into full light...

Not such a bad photo, all in all...

Thanks!
Steve