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Challenge: Can you rescue this kiss?

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Suixiong Pan

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My G2 greatly under exposed this shot at ISO 400. I have applied Fred's Noise reduction to get rid of the noise. However, I tried to use curves under ps 5 to correct the exposure but have not much luck. Can anyone help me save this kiss? ... :-)



Here's the full-size image:
http://www.pbase.com/image/4243793/original

Please post your best shot and the step you used as well. I am not trying to be lazy, just stumped...

Thanks,

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I made two attempts at this (a real challenge!).......the extreme amount of noise was difficult to work with, resulting images are soft, but this is the best I could do with them. One is b/w because I couldn't easily get rid of the color cast that resulted from using the noise filters (I used Neat Image). I'll post exactly what I did if you like these



and the black & white:


Suixiong Pan said:
My G2 greatly under exposed this shot at ISO 400. I have applied
Fred's Noise reduction to get rid of the noise. However, I tried
to use curves under ps 5 to correct the exposure but have not much
luck. Can anyone help me save this kiss? ... :-)



Here's the full-size image:
http://www.pbase.com/image/4243793/original

Please post your best shot and the step you used as well. I am not
trying to be lazy, just stumped...

Thanks,

--
span
Click to expand...
 

Suixiong Pan said:
My G2 greatly under exposed this shot at ISO 400. I have applied
Fred's Noise reduction to get rid of the noise. However, I tried
to use curves under ps 5 to correct the exposure but have not much
luck. Can anyone help me save this kiss? ... :-)



Here's the full-size image:
http://www.pbase.com/image/4243793/original

Please post your best shot and the step you used as well. I am not
trying to be lazy, just stumped...

Thanks,

--
span
Click to expand...
 
Beautiful job Koo. It's as soft as the kiss. If it were my picture I'd accept it.

Jim

--

'Countless unseen details are often the only difference between mediocre and magnificent'
 
Wow! I am amazed at the results. I especially like the b/w one. The images have a silky smooth quality to it. I had tried Neat Image on other photos before, but wasn't able to produce anything near this quality. By all means, please post the steps you took. I am trying to save this for a good friend, and I happen to think the kiss (and the expression of the pastor) is priceless. :)

Do you think more detail (pastor's glasses, flowers, etc.) might be extracted if the original images was worked on instead of the one already processed by Fred Miranda's NR action? I could post it on PBASE if you think it might make a difference. How about the original full-size, rather than the large size on PBASE?

Thank you so much!
koo22 said:


and the black & white:


Suixiong Pan said:
My G2 greatly under exposed this shot at ISO 400. I have applied
Fred's Noise reduction to get rid of the noise. However, I tried
to use curves under ps 5 to correct the exposure but have not much
luck. Can anyone help me save this kiss? ... :-)



Here's the full-size image:
http://www.pbase.com/image/4243793/original

Please post your best shot and the step you used as well. I am not
trying to be lazy, just stumped...

Thanks,

--
span
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
span
 
You've done a great job correcting the color/contrast and brightness of the image. In fact, that was my greatest frustration when working with this photo. How did you brighten the picture so much without washing it out? And how did you remove the heavy color cast? I am anxious to find out. Could you post the details of your process?

Btw, I think either the excessive noise in the original photo, or JPEG artifacts are causing big problem around many of the hard edges. If we can fix these, it will be close to perfect.

Thanks!
aruzinsky said:

Suixiong Pan said:
My G2 greatly under exposed this shot at ISO 400. I have applied
Fred's Noise reduction to get rid of the noise. However, I tried
to use curves under ps 5 to correct the exposure but have not much
luck. Can anyone help me save this kiss? ... :-)



Here's the full-size image:
http://www.pbase.com/image/4243793/original

Please post your best shot and the step you used as well. I am not
trying to be lazy, just stumped...

Thanks,

--
span
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
span
 
Isabel Cutler said:
ISO 400 pictures can look pretty bad.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, I am finding out the hard way. Flash was not allowed during the ceremony, and the chapel was somewhat dimly lit. There're no windows to let in outside light, and the lighting consists of mixed types. It was pretty much a worst case scenerio.
Isabel Cutler62850 said:
I routinely changed them to
black and white and they look instantly better...of course, I do
more fixing after that...usually noise removal and a bit of unsharp
masking.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I did some test of sephia toning and they looked better. However, I find that noise removal and unsharp mask seemed to work against each other. Noise removal gets rid of noise, but soften the image somewhat. USM sharpens the image, and brings back some of the noise. I sometimes feel like a cat chasing his own tail. What's your secret, repeated trial-and-error?
Isabel Cutler62850 said:
Isabel
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Digipets/?yguid=11497599
Click to expand...
Thanks,
--
span
 
Another idea, would be to try and make a feature of the noise rather than trying to soften it out. Like this, for instance?
http://www.pbase.com/image/4258236/large

This effect was achieved firstly by duplicating the layer and then on the top layer I used filter, artistic, poster edges (with opacity of the layer reduced to 15%) and then on the bottom layer using filter, artistic, water colour. I then ran the merged image through 'Neat Image' in order to try and soften the effect a bit (which I think stood out a bit too much mainly in the background). I think it helped to give a bit of texture to the faces, due to the original exposure making them look rather flat.

Here's another version which I experimented with - it's basically the same as the first one, but I also used filter, noise, add noise and then did edit, noise fade (50%).
http://www.pbase.com/image/4258421/large

Regards

Robert
 
That is an interesting approach. The resultant image look like an interesting watercolor painting. It is still a bit too dark, particularly the skin areas, for my taste. This is something I will try tonight. However, I think they (the couple) are more looking for a photographic look.

Thanks,
Robert Niel said:
Another idea, would be to try and make a feature of the noise
rather than trying to soften it out. Like this, for instance?
http://www.pbase.com/image/4258236/large

This effect was achieved firstly by duplicating the layer and then
on the top layer I used filter, artistic, poster edges (with
opacity of the layer reduced to 15%) and then on the bottom layer
using filter, artistic, water colour. I then ran the merged image
through 'Neat Image' in order to try and soften the effect a bit
(which I think stood out a bit too much mainly in the background).
I think it helped to give a bit of texture to the faces, due to the
original exposure making them look rather flat.

Here's another version which I experimented with - it's basically
the same as the first one, but I also used filter, noise, add noise
and then did edit, noise fade (50%).
http://www.pbase.com/image/4258421/large

Regards

Robert
Click to expand...
--
span
 
Suixiong Pan said:
That is an interesting approach. The resultant image look like an
interesting watercolor painting. It is still a bit too dark,
particularly the skin areas, for my taste. This is something I
will try tonight. However, I think they (the couple) are more
looking for a photographic look.

Thanks,
Click to expand...
As you found in your own trials, there's little tone variation in the shadows. So even when you lighten (-something like a duplicate layer with screen overlay type, for instance), you're basically left with noise. Once you remove, the noise, it ends up looking a little 'flat'. I've enjoyed seeing the different approaches posted.

Just for my own experimentation as much as anything, here's a version that's more colour balanced - something that lept out at me after I posted before. In B&W is an alternative variation.
http://www.pbase.com/image/4260607/large (colour)
http://www.pbase.com/image/4261509/large (b&w)

To go from colour to b&w, I used the 'channel mixer' method - Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Ticked monochrome then adjusted sliders to personal taste.
 
Hi....I'll be happy to explain what I did. For the color shot, I first made a duplicate layer and did a slight levels adjustment. Then I made an adjustment layer (Curves) and tried to lighten up the area around the bride's mouth by using Curves. This took a bit of trial and error. I also have a program called Pictographics "ICorrect", which I used then to adjust the skin tones (removing the ambient light color cast) by clicking on the neutral areas (groom's jacket, bride's dress, etc.) This program makes this easier, but the same thing can probably be accomplished by setting your black & white points manually in PS. Then I flattened the image, which was still full of noise. I saved it as a TIFF file, closed Photoshop, brought it into Neat Image and adjusted the filters there till I liked what I saw during the preview. I saved the filtered image also as a TIFF, brought it back into Photoshop and then Saved for Web.

For the black & white, I did all of the above but after I flattened the image, I used Channel Mixer to change to black & white (monochrome). Then I ran that one through Neat Image. I wanted to see it in black & white because no matter what I did with the color image, I couldn't get rid of the color cast near the original darker areas. Hope this helps you! K.
Suixiong Pan said:
Do you think more detail (pastor's glasses, flowers, etc.) might be
extracted if the original images was worked on instead of the one
already processed by Fred Miranda's NR action? I could post it on
PBASE if you think it might make a difference. How about the
original full-size, rather than the large size on PBASE?

Thank you so much!
koo22 said:


and the black & white:


Suixiong Pan said:
My G2 greatly under exposed this shot at ISO 400. I have applied
Fred's Noise reduction to get rid of the noise. However, I tried
to use curves under ps 5 to correct the exposure but have not much
luck. Can anyone help me save this kiss? ... :-)



Here's the full-size image:
http://www.pbase.com/image/4243793/original

Please post your best shot and the step you used as well. I am not
trying to be lazy, just stumped...

Thanks,

--
span
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
span
Click to expand...
 
Suixiong Pan said:
My G2 greatly under exposed this shot at ISO 400. I have applied
Fred's Noise reduction to get rid of the noise. However, I tried
to use curves under ps 5 to correct the exposure but have not much
luck. Can anyone help me save this kiss? ... :-)



Here's the full-size image:
http://www.pbase.com/image/4243793/original

Please post your best shot and the step you used as well. I am not
trying to be lazy, just stumped...

Thanks,

--
span
Click to expand...
Here is another version of the adjusted image.



Vernon...
http://www.pbase.com/vrain
 
I love the way the colors came out on your attempt. What's you technique? What settings did you use?

Looks like noise is still a big problem in the darker areas (hair, tux, shadow, etc.) I guess I will have to work on them on a seperate layer.

Could you post the details of your adjustments? I will try to work on it tonight and post the result.

Thanks!
Vernon D Rainwater said:
Here is another version of the adjusted image.



--
Vernon...
http://www.pbase.com/vrain
Click to expand...
--
span
 
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