beyond my ability

[Cheryl H]

My oldest son had a friend take this with a disposable camera the last day of school. It is really really bad. I've tried what I know (not much on fixing stuff) and the results are lousy.

Any help would be appreciated. Also, if anyone wants to offer advice on getting a better scan, I'd be happy for that as well.

I'm attaching the version before I messed it up trying to fix it.

Thanks.

[Cheryl H]

Thank you so much Chuck! My son will be thrilled. He's been trying to make polite faces at my attempts, but I could tell he was disappointed (with good reason).

Could I impose a little bit more and ask you to point me to somewhere, or give me directions, on how to set the white and black points in PS?

Thanks again.

Cheryl

[spinnnz]

Chuck, I hope you don't mind but I started with your image since you did such an excellent job with the noise and made just a few minor tweeks. I added a hue/sat layer and rather than select the Master Edit, I selected the yellows and greens and used the + eyedropper to click on the colors that i wanted to change and the - for the skintones and desaturated and lightened a little. Then I used a fill flash technique described here Fill Flash to brighten up the shadows.

-Lisa

[KenB]

Here's my attempt, the main problem after color correcting was the amount of noise that was uncovered.

Ken