Noise Ninja hand holding

[Corkster52]

Can someone familiar with Noise Ninja give me a step by step of how to fix this photo of my daughter? I have spent hours trying and gotten basically nowhere. Thanks!

Sam-Deca-Noise-thumbnail.jpg

[Kraellin]

since you posted this as a "noise ninja" question, i'll leave this here for now. generally, this would probably do better in the retouching forum or image help forum, but we'll see how it does here and move it if it doesnt get much response.

i dont use noise ninja, myself, but i can tell you this has more than just a noise problem. you also have a focus problem and a slilght lighting problem, as well. for the sharpening, i tried a couple things, unsharp mask and high pass sharpen. i wasnt really happy with either one or even both together, so you might want to look at 'focus magic' or 'unshake', but designed to help out of focus images.

for the lighting, you could do several things. a brightness/contrast adjustment layer would help, and if you also masked out the background and just applied that layer to the girl, that would probably work better.

[Corkster52]

Sorry about putting this thread in the wrong area. I am new and still getting the feel for how to correctly use this fantastic forum group. Thanks for your help.

[Corkster52]

I downloaded the trial version of Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 to see what it is all about. Will need to spend some time with it. It sure does suck up memory, and I only have 512M, but slow will be better than nothing. MY CS3 grabs a bunch too. If it weren't for all of the darn wires in front of my memory cards I would just add another 512. Thanks again.

[Kraellin]

paint shop pro has a very good noise cleanup tool called 'digital camera noise removal'. this is very much like noise ninja or neat image, but simpler to use. so, that may be your solution here.

also, since i mentioned neat image, you might want to try that one, too. there is a free version for evaluation purposes you can get. just do a google on it and you'll find it.

[Corkster52]

Craig, I dowloaded and installed Neat Image yesterday, but it seems almost as complex as Noise Ninja. This old mind of mine is in a serious bind trying to learn as much as I can as quickly as I can. Thanks!

[Corkster52]

Craig, not really getting much further with my daughter's picture but I do find this software quite fascinating. The 30-day full featured demo should give me ample time to decide if I will purchase it. Are you happy with your version overall?

[Kraellin]

of paintshop pro? yes, i use it more than photoshop. much easier learning curve for us old farts

[Kraellin]

here's your image with just one application of paint shop pro's 'digital camera noise removal'. and mind you, i did nothing else here that needs doing, just he noise reduction.

[Kraellin]

and here's a more complete restoration. blurred images are one of the most difficult to clean up. you'll find quite a few folks have posted in the restoration forum that simply were rejected by almost everyone as being too difficult and 'not worth the effort'. you're lucky here, in that this one isnt that far gone. but, it took a considerable amount of effort to get it back to just this stage.

it's conceivable that it could be taken further now, maybe with some more unsharp masking or high pass sharpen or just straight old sharpen, but, as i tried to do that i found i was messing up too many gains already won and not getting that much of a better result on the sharpening. so, i actually took it back a step or two in my workflow to this stage, where it was still pretty clean looking.

it's late right now and i'm not going to try to post my entire workflow here. it did involve some unsharp mask, sharpen more, attempts using high pass sharpen, which i think i ultimately rejected, a histogram adjustment to correct the poor lighting on the face, a digital camera noise removal, jpeg artifact removal, some airbrushing around the eyes and nose and lips to bring back some definition, some push, and other airbrushing on the skin to clean up more of the noise and probably a number of other things i've forgotten here.

you might also try the program 'unshake' or 'focus magic'. unshake is essentially free, where focus magic is commercial pay-for. both are decent at fixing minor blurring and camera shake. no program i've found will fix major blurring.

i'm also going to move this thread to the restoration forum where it will get more help than here.

[Corkster52]

Thanks Craig. This looks a lot better. Even though I have Photoshop CS3, it looks like I will purchase Paint Shop Pro X2 if for nothing more than being an interim step to my getting fully familiar with it (and who knows if that will ever happen).

[Corkster52]

Grrrr... Craig, I downloaded unshake and required Java but could not get Unshake to launch for some reason. Oh well.

[Kraellin]

corkster, you're welcome.

dont know why unshake wouldnt work. if you've got and installed the runtimes for java, and those are up to date, unshake shld work fine. which file did you use to try to run unshake? you need to double click the 'launch' file to run it. so, if you've got java and that's working and up to date, then the only other reason i know of that would screw things up is if you got a corrupted or incomplete download of unshake and you could simply try a new download.

[secretagents]

I have tried my hand at this one as well and well, I let you judge of the result.

I have used several plugins, Xero Improver, Mehdi Flat Median which is essential to the actual result, Photoplugins Contrast Mask to highlight darker areas a bit, Alois Zingl Sharpen and maybe also Xero Clarity.

All this had the result to also emphasize some of the noise by transforming it in rather big and ugly greenish blotches over the hair and face.

I then cleaned up that as best as I could with a mixture of median filter and hue brush on certain areas of the skin. For the hairs I choose to colorize them.

At that point I also colorized the background in order to get a more vivid and warmer image.

Finished with a slight brightness/contrast adjustment.

I am not too displeased with the result.

[synthetamine]

lets just say... as a thumbnail it looks nice.

Regarding noise ninja, you can pretty much just open it and click apply, its really simple but this image is more blurry over noisy.