What's the Cause

[bcarll]

Hi All,

Never have submitted a photo before for help but here's one I'm puzzled about. First off what caused this to happen? Seems like I've seen this before but can't remember when. Then my next question is how to fix it? This was a picture taken with a 4 MP camera I was told. A family member asked me to fix it if I could. Am I seeing the results of too much info on too large of a picture or is it something else? bcarll

[Stephen A]

That's ISO. I assume it was taken indoors with regular light bulbs lighting the place?

Your eyes will adjust, but the camera can only do so by upping the ISO - which in turn causes more noise. You could try noise ninja, but it ain't free. I loaded it up and applied Neat Image's "Reduce Noise" filter and ran it through the "Shadow/highlight" adjustment in Photoshop.

[0lBaldy]

This looks mighty blurry to me.. I am waiting to see what others can do with it

Ran it through Imagenomic Portraiture a couple times, took the red out of the eyes, cleaned the teeth and lips a little

[DCobb]

I gave this a try. Using CS3 noise filter, I reduced the color noise on a per channel basis and then used the degrunge technique.

dc

[mistermonday]

As Stephen has pointed out the image has color noise, some of the worst I have seen. It is blotch and ununiform which leads me to believe that there has been some additional post processing of the image after it left the camera. I ran Imagenomic's Noiseware filter with some fine tuning of the controls. The image is not as sharp as I would like but it is also not as blurred as it could be if you remove all of the noise. These things are a trade off.
Regards, Murray

[klassylady25]

Tonight with just a little bit of work some of that cast is gone. Hard to remove all the noise without also remove the character of the photo.

[lurch]

Everyone has pointed out that there's lots of noise here, and the tradeoff is between noise removal and blurring. I used my favorite technique for noise removal just to see if it could lead to a little less blurring. Here are the steps (Photoshop CS3):

-duplicate background layer and turn dup into a smart object.
-double-click SO layer and convert the resulting .psb to Lab.
-in the .psb make a loose selection of the skin areas.
-run Noise Ninja on each of the 3 Lab channels separately. Different settings were needed for each one. In the Lightness channel I also masked out the eyes and mouth.
-sharpen Lightness channel
-save .psb
-return to original for usual color correction

Y'all can decide for yourselves if this is enough (or any) better to warrant the extra steps . . .

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[GrahamP]

Greetings to all.

This is my first post to the forum but I found this image so intriguing I wanted to give it a try myself. It seems to be a resampled crop from a larger original. The JPG artifacts, which are fairly pronounced, show the classic 8x8 pattern but extend over a greater number of pixels. That can account for some of the blotchiness of the chromatic noise but not all. If I had to guess, and of course I will, I'd suspect a inkjet print on non-photo quality paper and then scanned.

In working on the image I first adjusted with levels to give a full tonal range to work with. Then created a duplicate layer and desaturated it. Working with Elements here so no channels. The desaturated layer was put through Noise Ninja at a low setting. Made a second duplicate and put that through Noise Ninja at a high setting. Placed the second duplicate above the desaturated layer and set blending mode to color. There was still some objectionable noise on the left facial cheek so a duplicate of the color layer was added and I applied a Gaussian Blur, masked off everything else but that area of cheek and added it on top of the layer stack with normal blending mode. There was no detail in that area to worry about. Flattenedthe image and lightly sharpened the edge of the hair, mouth and eyes.

I'll be most interested in any comments and feedback. What little I know about photo restoration has come almost equally from this forum and Katrin Eismann's most excellent book.

Graham

[dkf10425]

I ran through Neat Image once for the skin and made a snapshop. Went back to orginal image and ran through Neat Image and focused on hair. Made a snapshop. Used history brush to paint on skin and hair adjustments from the snapshops. Brightened teeth. Fixed lips. Curves and levels adjustment layers. Used brushes to even out skin. I suspect this image has already been post processed because my neat image says the camera was a SONY DSC-W7 and the device mode was Photoshop 7.
Edit: Fixed the eyes.

[Nan]

I started out by running the change to target brush all over the face, which got rid of the multicolors in the noise, then ran digital camera noise removal twice. Used the makeover brush to blend some more, then high pass sharpen and added a little noise back.
Nan

[Alison]

Has this image already have some processing applied to it ?

Took the red and yellow out in a hue/sat layer, masked to apply this to the skin area only. Ran through neat image, took opacity down, applied to skin only. Applied film grain, but not to the skin area. Used a warming filter on the skin only, used neat image again (on all the image), brought back the eyes and lips with a mask. Used a curves adjustment layer.

[tell]

Hello everyone. Its been a while since my last post. Bcarl, the girl in this still is glowing with happiness. Ive tryed to remove some of the noise by using the channel mixer and decreasing the effects of the green channel. Did also play with selective colour to remove some of the red spots.. Camera technology is smart but needs some more work for inside shots. Im speaking from experience with the lower end cameras and my limited knowledge of photography..

[bcarll]

I want to thank everyone for posting suggestions etc. I tried to remove the noise and was successful using a technique I read here. Thanks for the headsup on Noise nija, never heard of it until now. For those of you that asked if this picture had been processed before the answer is no. I ran it through PS7 just to reduce the size for web posting. This is how it came off the camera and to my desktop PC. A big thanks to all that helped me learn another lesson in restoring a photo.

bcarll

[chillin]

I’ve applied twice red spots removal method for reds & magenta.
I reduced the noise 3 times (on a layer, red channel & blue channel), I masked the hair a bit. At the end, I created a high pass filter layer from the green channel & sharpen some details.

[lurch]

bcarll,
Happy to have been (hopefully) of some help. Good luck on your restoration efforts.
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