Creative Interpretations: Halloween face

[botulism2]

I took some extremely underlit pictures at a halloween party with my digital camera. A piece of one is attached. As you can see there is considerable speckling, especialy in the blue channel. Some of the images are really interesting and I thought since they're so degraded anyway I would try to give them a sort of "oil-painted" look. The watercolor look really will not work for me. Problem is I can't seem to get rid of the speckles entirely. I've tried everything I could find here, even going so far as to get rid of the blue channel entirely and use the green channel instead, suitably adjusted with levels.

What I want is to give the surfaces a very smooth shiny look, especially the faces. Please help!

[Noelf]

Originally Posted by botulism2

I took some extremely underlit pictures at a halloween party with my digital camera. A piece of one is attached. As you can see there is considerable speckling, especialy in the blue channel. Some of the images are really interesting and I thought since they're so degraded anyway I would try to give them a sort of "oil-painted" look. The watercolor look really will not work for me. Problem is I can't seem to get rid of the speckles entirely. I've tried everything I could find here, even going so far as to get rid of the blue channel entirely and use the green channel instead, suitably adjusted with levels.

What I want is to give the surfaces a very smooth shiny look, especially the faces. Please help!

I'm not exactly sure what you were looking for, but playing with it a bit using gaussian blur cleaned up the dots quite a bit.

Then you could add a filter effect to that (plastic wrap was fun!)

- Noel

[botulism2]

what i had in mind, although the plastic wrap is an interesting idea. i've been trying all sorts of blur possibilities - gaussian blur, smart blur, cross-hatching, etc... but all i end up with is a lot of blurry stuff with no edges. what i want is to somehow find the edges that are in the unblurred picture, without finding the edges of the noise, then create a new picture with hard lines and smooth areas of color, like a real painting.

[Leah]

I'm not sure about the artistic effect you're after, but Neat Image (you can download a free demo) does a pretty good job of clearing up the speckles.

[Duv]

I used the Magnetic Lasso to select face then added Shift to select forehead areas. Chose Noise/Median 21 pixels then Guass Blur 3 pixels. Hit ALT - ADD VECTOR MASK and painted face with soft white brush set to 27% opacity and hard light. Let me know if we're getting anywhere close.

Cheers
Duv

[jch71566]

OK, this is very interesting!

Let me preface this with the fact that I use PSP7. The settings may vary for Photoshop or PSP8.

Here's what I did:
1) Adjust picture brightness/contrast.

I used Histogram adjustment with the following settings: In Low=0, In Gamma=1.75, In High=109, Out Low=0, Out High=255, Midtones Compress/Expand=-10 (expand).

2) Smooth Picture.

I tried lots of things, but finally decided on the free Xero plugin "Super Smooth" (available at http://www.xero-graphics.co.uk/). I used Radius=10 and Edge=50. I had to follow this up with a Median Filter, Radius=3 to get rid of some specks.

The results are posted here.

For next steps, you can try smart-blur, another application of Super Smooth, or other techniques to your liking.

Enjoy, and good luck!

-Jeff

[LQQKER]

Good advice by all.

I tried to keep as much detail as possible and I didn't place too much emphasis on the dude in the background. Only a few moments were required to this point.

Manual levels adjustment on individual channels
Ran Noise Ninja (Similiar to neat image)
Used digital Sho to bring out some detail (curve adjustment would also suffice).
Ran Noise Ninja again
Automatic Photoshop 7 color adjustment
Made a slight hue & Saturation adjustment.

At this point there's obviously still grain, however not knowing exactly what artistic look you're going for, these steps along with the other suggestions should help.

[botulism2]

wow i really like what neatimage did for me. i went way overboard with the noise filtering and got something like this. only problem i have now is color banding, especially on the face. you probably can't see it at this resolution. is there a tool i could use to smooth it over and average things out? i tried smudge but it doesn't seem to do anything except move the bands around.

thanks for the great tips!

[jch71566]

Originally Posted by botulism2

wow i really like what neatimage did for me. i went way overboard with the noise filtering and got something like this. only problem i have now is color banding, especially on the face. you probably can't see it at this resolution. is there a tool i could use to smooth it over and average things out? i tried smudge but it doesn't seem to do anything except move the bands around.

thanks for the great tips!

Glad you got some usable advice. As for color-banding, I like to use a selection or mask & then a gaussian blur.

-Jeff

[catia]

Well, I decided to go all the way (pardon the expression) and turn it into a painting.

Ran Neat Image, then opened the filtered version in PSP8. Adjusted the brightness and contrast and then ran the Watercolor script. Cropped to 5x7 and saved.

Catia

Hmmmm, Didn't like that. Duped the final layer. Ran edge preserving smooth and added a brushstroke texture. Set blend mode to soft light and faded to 20%.

[roger_ele]

for color banding I would;

-duplicate the layer, work on the top layer
-use the blur tool, color mode. stroke accross the band, but not with a stroke length that will muddy the colors - just soften the transistion.

[Peter S]

I know botulism2 was after a smooth look, but he/she???? also wanted a painted look.

Peter

[alexmeta]

Attempt to oil. Impressionist.