Reading Programming

Well, since there is no 'Photo Editing' forum, I'll just post this into the least inappropriate Tech forum, mmkay? :-)

While I'm by no means a professional paparazzo or DTP wizard, I'm usually well able to take a bunch of pictures with my digicam and explain to Photoshop what I expect it to do with them.

At present I'm however stuck on a problem that may not even be solvable at all. I have a picture that looks like this -

(It is supposed to be an anthracite suit with a yellow rose and an eggshell-white shirt/tie.)

As you can see, there's a tremendous amount of CCD noise. This is because the picture was, according to the EXIF data, taken with no flash, 1/60s shutter speed and 400 ISO in a relatively dark room.
I have tried all kinds of blur- and despeckle-style effects (on the whole picture as well as on separate channels), the (generally good) NoiseNinja plug-in and about two Google result pages' worth of noise/moire removal tutorials. I can somewhat fix the suit by removing the blue channel, turning down contrast and saturation and then applying the 'Blur' and 'Sharpen edges' filters.

Normally I would be annoyed a bit and then forget about it. However, the picture in question is the only one of two 'wedding kiss' pictures, and the second one is even worse. The guy who took them is supposed to be a professional photographer, all other pictures are excellent, don't ask me what he was thinking.

Soo, does anybody happen to know of a way to rescue this picture? The original picture is 4288x2848 pixels, I wouldn't mind if the resulting picture is resampled or cropped if it helps the cause. It'd also be worth a to-be-specified amount of cash or chocolate.

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

Well, if the problem still needs helping on, I can see what a friend has to say. No promises, though.

自作自受

The problem does still need helping on, albeit it's not as urgent as it used to be (considering that the wedding took place almost a year ago). If your friend has an opinion on the picture I'd like to hear it, but only if it's not too much trouble :-)

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

I'll keep you "posted", so to speak.

自作自受

It seems nothing can help the digital photo, but I've to wait to for permissions to relay the entire opinion as quoted text. In this case, I'll send it to you in an e-mail.

自作自受

If your friend has an opinion on the picture I'd like to hear it

Are you sure? Maybe we can talk about something else, say, the weather.

Gee, null, it sure is nice weather we're having, wouldn't you agree?

自作自受

Professional Photographer? He should have been shooting in RAW, then, but i dont think even that would do a great deal. I think you might be able to get rid of some of the chromatic aberration, but itll still be blurred unless you use some excessive filtering.

I dont use photoshop, I use the GIMP. Its free, and does a lot of the stuff I like to do a lot more intuitively, IMO, than PS does.Unfortunately im back at home using a seven year old pc thats temperamental as fuck as opposed to my slick pc at university.

However, if anyone cares to download this for free, the filters I would use would be on Image> Colours> Curves, and Filters>Colours> Filter Pack,, noise reduction, possibly retinex as an indicator of colours, the usual blur/sharpen and smooth image.

If youre prepared to wait until i get back to uni two weeks from now, ill have a play around with it.

Sir Deimos, Beater of Ass.

the filters I would use would be on Image> Colours> Curves, and Filters>Colours> Filter Pack,, noise reduction, possibly retinex as an indicator of colours, the usual blur/sharpen and smooth image.

Ooh, I shall definitely try that.

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid