This weekend I took some photos for my niece and her family and must of had my camera on the wrong setting. Anyway I have tried everything I can think of to fix these pictures. But I'm new to this So I'm asking for help on how to fix them. I cannot figure out how to make it clear.
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melissaj19401766 wrote
Not everyone of them are like this but most are I do have I think like three that came out ok. But I'm so new to using photoshop elements that I just can't figure it out.
Try this, but the artifacts remain. You can try to paint over them, but that will be less than satisfactory.
Open the picture file
Go to Enhance menu>Adjust lighting>Levels, and work the sliders below the histogram
Next Go to Enhance menu>Unsharp Mask. Amount=42%, Radius=1.1px, Threshold=1 level
The issue appears to be the camera was using very high ISO so there is significant noise that the camera then tried to remove, somewhat, and now you have blotchy color and fine grain specks everywhere.
You need to figure out what you did with your camera so it doesn't happen again. What are the Shutter, Aperture, and ISO settings of some of these shots that look bad?
As far as how to fix them, here is my 2-cents worth:
First I used Filter/Noise/Despeckle to remove the tiny spots everywhere.
Then I did the rest of the adjustments in the Camera Raw filter in PS CC 2017.
First, I improved the contrast and other basic settings by clicking Auto in the Basic Toning area. This made the lower left of her dress a bit too oversaturated so I increased the Blacks slider a little:
The contrast and overall tone can be improved a bit more but this was just something simple to demonstrate some of the changes that can be made.
Increasing the contrast caused the blotchy color noise to be more apparent, especially in the darker area of her hair, so I switched to the detail tab and moved the Color slider up quite a bit:
There are still a couple areas where the purple botches aren't entirely removed, so I switched to the Adjustment Brush with its Moiré Reduction slider all the way up and painted over the areas that needed a bit more color smoothing. There are two views, one with a purple mask overlay showing where my brush strokes were, and the other without the mask enabled so you can see the effect of the brushing:
There is still quite a bit of granular roughness texture due to the noise-reduction steps both in camera and in Photoshop, so the final step is to add back a little bit of smaller grain noise to help obscure the larger texture. You don't want to do this step until you're ready to be finished with the photo, so I saved it until last. It's likely your photos are larger than what you've posted that we're starting with, here, so the parameters of the noise-reduction and the add-noise steps might be somewhat different, but you can get the idea of how things are done with this example:
There might still be a bit too much purple in her hair for my liking so if these were my photos I'd probably do a more careful job.
Here's the final result.
The color noise reduction tends to significantly reduce the intensity of colors in smaller areas, like their lips, so if these were my photos, I might take the Adjustment Brush and make the Moiré Reduction back to 0 and increase the Saturation slider a bit, and decrease the brush size significantly, and paint some thing brush strokes of increased saturation over their lips to make them more intense, again, if that's what they looked like in real life.
The result of my edits aren't really that satisfactory, in my opinion, but they are better than the starting point.
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