Underexposed on a Cheap Camera :-(

[Noah]

Hi folks,

I'm new around here, and relatively new to photo retouching and restoration. But I'm finding it very fun, and the site has really helped me in fixing up the wedding pictures that I often work on. Thanks much

Recently my cousin sent me one of his favorite shots of his children playing with their grandmother. Unfortunately, the shot is quite dark, and full of fuzzy artifacts. I'd love to be able to get as much detail out of it as possible, especially of the grandmother's face. But, as yet, it's a bit beyond my skill.

I've used noise reduction filtering, redeye tool, and some selective sharpening with the byRo Graphics Eq action posted elsewhere on this site, among other things, and gotten semi-decent results, but I'm hoping there are some better techniques for getting rid of the artifacts mangling the details of this picture.

If anyone is willing to help, I'd much appreciate it. And I'd even more appreciate any explanation of how you got the results you got, so I can do similar jobs in the future. (At least till I can afford to get my cousin a real camera lol.)

I'm attaching the version of the picture before any of my editing, with the thought that some of what I did may have been destructive. I'd attach them both, but figured it'd be best I spent all of my 100kb on as much detail as I could manage to upload.

<edit>If anyone wants the full resolution version, please let me know and I'll be happy to email it to you. It's 664kb.</edit>

Thanks in advance. I know my cousin's family would love to get a version of this picture that doesn't look so bad.

Noah

[Noah]

Ah, I see from the welcome message that it's ok to use multiple posts to post more than 100kb worth of pictures on the subject. Cool, then here's my first attempt at this pic. I wasn't satisfied w/ the results, but it was about all I knew how to do with such a damaged photo at this time.

Any help or critique would be much appreciated.

Thanks again,

Noah

[Kraellin]

hi noah,

and welcome to RP

the 100k limit is per image, not overall. so, you could put 5, 100k images in the same post. load one, hit browse again and load another and so on up to the 5 image limit.

as for the work, start with brightening the image up. this can be done with curves, levels, or constrast/lightness quite easily. get the balance you want and then look at the color balance. i dont have photoshop, so there are some good tools for this that my paint shop pro (psp) doesnt have. in psp i might use channel mixing or hue/saturation/lightness.... just depends.

once you've got the basic image lightened, contrasted and balanced, THEN start your red-eye removal, noise reduction, clean up and so on.

if for any reason detail is lacking, while you're working with curves and contrast/lightness, use those to bring out more detail, or use channels to find where the detail is and work from there.

Craig

[Kraellin]

ah, we posted at the same time

ok, for noise reduction, get the free version of Neat Image. this is a great noise reducer. the free version will only work in the stand-alone version, but if you upgrade to the pro version you can use it as a plugin, which can be even more helpful.

Craig

[Noah]

Thanks much,

Just downloaded Neat Image and will start playing around with that. Thanks for the quick reply(s).

[Kraellin]

you're welcome. and keep us updated. would love to see how it comes out.

Craig

[Noah]

Ok, I used the redeye tool, some auto levels, and Shadow/Highlights to get the image to a decent starting point. (I found that if I tried using redeye after the Neat Image it didn't work right for me.)

Then I moved on to Neat Image and got rid of a large chunk of the artifacts. Thanks a ton for lettin me know about that wonderful tool. I'll likely buy it.

To clean up what I could of the rest, I made a layer that was Gausian blurred, medianed, dusted and scratched, and lightly grain textured then layer masked it on here and there for facial smoothness, etc.

I noticed there was still a light chroma artifact on most of the greyish things in the image, so I selected them all and desaturated.

Then I selectively sharpened with the graphic equalizer tools I mentioned in my original post.

That's where I've gotten so far. I'd like to be able to make it even better, but I'm not sure where to go from here without loosing features. Any help/critique much appreciated.

Thanks,

Noah

[Caitlin]

That's looking great Noah! The only place where some loss of detail is obvious is the grandmother's face. You have lost some detail throughout the picture by using NeatImage, but it largely in the face it is a concern that it looks 'soft'. If you have made each major change on a new copy layer, you could try masking out some of the detail on the grandmothers face on the noise reduced layer, to reveal the greater detail in the layer below.

I'm not sure if the attached really demonstrates well what I mean - I put your first restore, and latest restore on top of each other, and masked out some detail on the face, and sofa to reveal the detail in the first version below. Working with your layers should be more effective.

[Hephaestos]

Had a go with this one.

First step was screen copies. I used five (!) here, that got the background looking right exposure-wise. Foreground was by then overexposed so I put on a black/white gradient fill layer to cover that.

Next stamped the visible layers and ran despeckle, then sharpened with a 1-px high-pass overlay, then stamped again and ran neatimage.

Didn't mess with the redeye obviously.

[Kraellin]

excellent, noah! that's really come a long ways.

now, just follow what caitlin said and you shld have it. (nicely done, caitlin!)

Craig

[Noah]

Thanks much all for the great input and your work on the picture.

Caitlin, that's an excellent point, thanks. You even manage to get some of the texture, destroyed by Neat Image, from the couch back with your method. I plan to attempt what you've done and also to desaturate the grey tones to get rid of the chroma artifacting that your method reintroduced and I'm thinking it'll be a rap...unless, of course, anyone else has any great ideas to move it even further forward after I post the next try.

[Noah]

Originally Posted by Hephaestos

First step was screen copies. I used five (!) here, that got the background looking right exposure-wise. Foreground was by then overexposed so I put on a black/white gradient fill layer to cover that.

Hmm the screen technique is a great one if you don't have the shadows/highlights from Photoshop CS or CS2. But I'd suggest when you try it in the future you might want to mask out the forground rather than letting it become washed out then correcting afterward.

You seem to have lost a bit of the color from the child in the front's skin showing through her shirt, for instance. Not a great detail, granted, but no need to loose anything if you create a selection around the forground subjects and then take that out of each or your effects with a white bucket fill on a layer mask or invert the selection and just apply everything to said inverted selection leaving the forground subjects out.

Another thing you might consider trying is to turn up the saturation when you apply multiple screen effects. I think it gets lowered and has to be corrected some if you use it several times. (I'm a newb. If I'm wrong, please feel free to point it out. )

Originally Posted by Hephaestos

Next stamped the visible layers and ran despeckle, then sharpened with a 1-px high-pass overlay, then stamped again and ran neatimage.

I'm not positive on this, but I'd suggest you might get better results running Neat Image before you do any of this. Otherwise you're editing heavily artifacted pixels which may become amplified and even harder to correct. Also if you have a neat image profile for a given camera or device, or can find one on the web site, then I suspect it'd apply much better before any manipulation in a photo editing program than afterward.

Thanks much for your help. I hope I was able to offer something helpful in return.

[Noah]

Ok, just finished with version 3. Really starting to shape up nicely thanks to all the great help you folks have provided. :-) Am learning a lot. So glad to have stumbled upon this site.

As you suggested, Caitlen, I superimposed my first retouch on the second one. I put it on with a very low overall opacity just to allow a bit of the original texture and such to come back into the whole layer. But, with a second copy of the retouch 1 layer, I used a layer mask to selectively add in more to places like Grandma's face and the textures on the couch. I love how that brought back some of the real features but no longer looks near as fuzzy as it did in the original picture. Great insight there on your part.

Turned out I didn't even need to desaturate the carpets and walls for chroma this time since I only applied a very light amount of the first fix to them and it wasn't enough (at least w/ my cheap-o monitor) to add an offensive chroma artifact.

Then I did a light lasso/cut/paste/screen on the bright spots on her eyes to bring out a bit of shine and proceeded to the byRo Graphics Eq (I love this little action you put together byRo, thanks a million.) and did a bit of soft light sharpening to selected areas (Again layer mask. Learned about that from a tutorial I read here. Changes everything!) to accentuate details like the separation between teeth, some of the facial features, and a bit on the pillows on the couch.

In all I'm very well pleased with this learning experience. I'd be happy to hear of any more that could be done, as I'm sure there's always room for improvement. But I'm certain my cousin will be very happy indeed to see that one of his favorite pictures of Grandma and the kids is now actually worth printing.

Thanks a bunch,

Noah

[Kraellin]

But I'm certain my cousin will be very happy indeed to see that one of his favorite pictures of Grandma and the kids is now actually worth printing.

and that's when you know it's done. well done, noah!

Craig

[freddieanne]

Noah,

You've worked wonders! You and your cousin should be very pleased.

My only suggestion would be to rotate it a little. It's just a personal thing, but I find it more pleasing when things look level and plumb. I've taken the liberty and attached an example. (2nd attachment)

Again, very nicely done.

Annabel