Photoshoppers; Critique please?

[Touchdown]

Meet Glenn, a good long lost friend of mine back in my College days. He's on a roll of film that unfortunately was my first I ever developed. I obviously didn't know what I was doing in the dark, much less on how to take portraits, but that's for another time.

Here he is straight from the CD, which was taken directly from the 15 year old, and really damaged negative. Way underexposed is an understatement.



After cropping, and the one click contrast correction, I get this...



Although I may have missed a few things, here's what I did.
Paint brush (of course :eyes: )
Gaussian Blur at 1.5
Sharpen More
Dropped contrast 5%
Boosted brightness 15%
...after about an hour of all this...



Good? Bad? Need a little work? I understand that the grain is unavoidable, and I'm fine with that, but it seems a little less photoy and more newsprinty. I want the gloss (life) back on his face in the 2nd photo. Any hints to shine it up?

[LeftPeopleFinishFirst]

1. Well the original had no contrast!

So you're trying to create life that wasn't there in the original negative... and that's impossible. I'm confident in saying that in looking at the negative you posted, you did all that you could to get it looking halfway decent.

[Xithras]

2. Grain is NOT unavoidable

If you're willing to accept a slight blurring of some fine details, grain can be almost completely eliminated from many photos. For images like this, where the grain is actually a detriment and is obscuring the image, a slight loss of fine resolution is usually an acceptable tradeoff for clearing up the photos subject. For comparison:

[LeftPeopleFinishFirst]

3. He looks plastic when you blur it.

It makes for quite a non-human, unsettling effect, but he definitely looks like a wax dummy. :shrug:

[Xithras]

4. Hmm, do a Sharpen Edges followed by a Sharpen on it

The "waxy" effect really doesn't bother me because it tends to also remove minor blemishes from the subject (it gets used in a lot of glamour-shot type photos), but if you want to remove it you can do a Sharpen Edges followed by a Sharpen. I just tried it out and the "wax" effect was nearly eliminated while still keeping 95% of the grain reduction.

I'd do it and upload it to my hosting server myself to demonstrate, but my workday is done and I'm headed out the door!

[Touchdown]

5. Ok, tell me your steps.

I must know. I must, I must!

I agree with the waxy look, but the eyes are still sharp in your example up there. The problem with the sharpen feature, is if you use it too much, you start to see unrealistic dots, sort of like sand.

But your removal of the excesive grain is what really strikes me.:hi:

[Xithras]

6. Steps 1, 2, and 3...don't just rely on Photoshop.

Every artist has more than one brush, and no single program can do it all. I use Photoshop for a LOT of stuff, but I have other tools for specialty work.

In this particular instance, I used a program called Neat Image Pro+ (www.neatimage.com). It's a $75 dollar program designed specifically to remove grain and compression artifacts from images. Personally, I use it to remove pixel noise created when doing long exposure photography on my digital camera (I do lots of astrophoto and night shots).

If you don't have $75, you can keep downloading the demo and do 90% of what the commercial version does, only you'll have to deal with the nag screens.

Basically I ran the image through Neat Image (on fully automatic settings, it actually does an even better job if you take the time to hand tailor the images) and posted the version above. If I take it back into Photoshop after that and do a Sharpen Edges followed by a Sharpen, it bring the pore detail back out and eliminates that overblurred appearance that gives it the waxy feeling:


If this were my image, my next steps would be to manually edit out the white spots on the brow, cheek and nose by replacing them with the color of their neighboring pixels. That should give you a pretty clean final image..

[LeftPeopleFinishFirst]

7. Just curious

Why would you not leave the light values in the brow as is? There are few "highlights" in this photo, editing out the brow highlights would make the stand out less. Without light values the picture becomes FLAT.

[Touchdown]

8. LPFF has a point about the white highlights.

This was taken in Missouri, during September in a dorm that wasn't air conditioned. He was not only sweaty but ripe as well. Pretty humid IIRC, so that sweat captures the moment for me.

Does this neat image pro work on OSX? Is there a consumer grade version like PSE?

[Touchdown]

9. I answered my own questions.

I went to the neat image site, and there is a MAC OSX version. It's 2.2, seems it's a little behind Windows' v4, but it's only $40 for a single user. Sounds like a bargain to me.

Reading the specs, it should do a good job removing the screen door effect of flatbed scanner noise too, right?

Thanks for the tips!:toast:

EDIT: PS...since you took my link, the one you worked on is further compressed. I still have my 20 meg PSD of the original, so it should look better than this (which is more than I could hope for BTW), correct?