Improving high ISO photos

Question

On a recent holiday I was forced to either miss a shot of father and daughter together or use a high ISO setting (12800) with a low shutter speed 1/25th. All things considered it is a decent photo of "one of those moments". My problem is that I would like to improve the photo shadows under the daughters chin. I have the latest versions of both LR and PS and have tried numerous ways but I always end up with the shadow becoming a segregation of light and dark pixels. I can vary the colour but not the separation. What would be a "perfect" solution would be to blend adjacent pixels without bluring the main features. If I show the photo at a small size ( 2" x 3" ) the speckled effect is not noticable but what I want is the same visual effect at a slightly larger image size (5" x & 7" so not huge). Is this a step too far for PS or am I missing something which would fix my problem?

D Fosse · Accepted Answer

One trick is to duplicate the layer with as much noise reduction/blur as required - and then use Blend If so that it only affects the shadows. This way the general perceived sharpness of the image won't suffer much.

For noise reduction, you can use either Filter > Camera Raw Filter, or Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise.

In Blend If, set "this layer" so it won't pick up the noise. Press Alt to split the sliders.

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