Saving a photo taken in poor light - A Before and After

[peterdove]

I have included two links below which point to a before and after ( my wife will never forgive me for showing the original, but here it goes The original picture was taken in very poor light with a high ISO of 1600 on a digital camera with a load of noise. My wife was also VERY tired.

Original : http://www.kortexchess.com/images/old.jpg

New : http://www.kortexchess.com/images/millyandemma.jpg

The new image also contains a picy in the top right hand corner of my daughter ( who was also taken out of a rather dull picture and provide a mat and background for her.

Let me know what you all think

[Asiva]

That's a great way to salvage a photo. You did a great job.
Anyway I was intrigue by the challenge of actually correcting the image for color balance so I gave it a try with Asiva.
What do you think?

Corrected Color

[chiquitita]

I think it sounds like an advertisement

[Jakaleena]

Here's what I did:

1. Duplicated image and switched dupe to Lab mode

2. Adjusted levels on L channel in Lab mode

3. Replaced the Green & Blue channels in the original with the adjusted L channel

That's it!

[Doug Nelson]

Replaced blue channel with green channel
Adjusted levels on individual channels
Duped layer and used levels to lighten a LOT
Copied original and used threshold to make a mask of just the darkest areas, applied mask to lightened dupe layer
Changed mode to 'lighten'
Cranked down opacity
Used gaussian blur on mask to ease transitions

[pstewart]

Asiva, I looked at your web site. The software looks inviting. I want to see more! Nice job on your artistic renderings too.

Doug, good job on separating out the color. I would suggest tweaking it a bit away from green/red toward blue/yellow, though, with hue-saturation...should come out just right!

Jak, thanks for the tip on adjusting in lab mode...great for these bad channel pics. I went a bit beyond what you did and corrected the resultant pink by layering, hue/sat, and modes...wish I hadn't closed the PSD file because I lost the steps before I could write them down. One thing I know I did was to use hue/sat on the lab corrected version to get more yellow and saturation, then go to noise-->median to blur the blotchy coloring a bit then layer it over the red channel and set to color. Other color tweaking steps followed. Another thing I recall is that I selected the forehead, nose, and shoulder areas from the original, which were washed out too much on the new version, then put them on a low opacity layer above and erased away the edges with a big fuzzy eraser to blend them in.

Of course, you would want to tweak this with color mode brush on the face and hair, etc. But it's fun to try to correct color as much as possible without going to a manual method, isn't it?

Phyllis