How would you clean this picture?

[Romany]

Hi All
Been away for a bit, i have a photo here i would like to get some feedback on how to clean up, the photo shows a family on a night out, i would like to see what methods other people would use to clean up this particular image.
Cheers All
Romany

[MBChamberlain]

Ouch...I hate these pictures.

I ran neat image (and I think I over did it a little), adjusted the levels, used high pass to sharpen, and a little adjustment to the curves.

Probably better ways to do it, but this is what came to mind.

Michael

[Kraellin]

yup, i'm not real fond of this type of picture either. it always ends up as a judgement call. do i take out all the noise and reduce detail or do i compromise? in this particular case, i compromised.

the first thing i did was crop the picture. i assumed (correctly or incorrectly) that the folks facing the camera were the family and that the two folks on the left and right were simply there, but not family. so, i cropped them out. this removes a LOT of the high noise area and makes things a bit easier.

next, i also ran neat image to reduce noise, but i purposely didnt try to remove all. i just wanted to reduce it but leave detail as much as possible. the people are so far from the camera and the lighting is poor, so this was the biggest compromise.

after neat image i sharpened more.

then i ran a very high contrast -40 brightness/+60 contrast to bring the people out more and also to reduce the light 'haze' look.

i then ran the Fast Fix plugin to adjust saturation, lightness and contrast and to reduce a bit of the red that the high contrast adds.

and that was it. now, you could easily alter several of these steps to reduce noise more or to sharpen more, but in doing so there is a trade-off of various other factors. so, make your choices as desired.

Craig

edit: oh, and you could now run the polaroid d&s program to remove some of the remaining spots. i didnt for this example.

[Ken Fournelle]

I first made a Levels Adjustment Layer and ran Neat Image.
I next made a Curves Adj. Layer to adjust the night background and painted the group back in with a layer mask. Adjusted the saturation and ran a High Pass sharpening

k

[Romany]

Cheers All, these type of photo's will be the death of me!!
Romany

[DaveS]

I first cropped the image to the main group, did a levels adjustment with the black point the lady second from right. Saved the image and opened it in neat image saved the filtered image, re-opened in photoshop and ran the high pass filter to sharpen up the image a little.Some touching up will still be required to get rid of some the the artifacts.
Dave

[krishna]

I tried an extreme attempt to do away with the noise which I think will not effectively work in colour mode. Edited the FFT in AstraImage. Just a tiny black speck in the center and that got rid of the noise and darkened the picture too. But managed to get the faces better.

All of the posted pictures look nice and sober. I especially liked the work of Dave.

--
Krishna

[LanceHaverkamp]

All I did was:

auto-adjust the levels
raise the gamma
lower the color saturation

Using The Gimp in Linux

LanceHaverkamp