Not Related To Cars, But How Can You Help Get Rid Of Some Graininess?

[ChadMKIII]

Subject basically says it, I'm retouching some photos for my yearbook class, some of them are kinda dark, and when I lighten them they become more and more grainy.

I have Photoshop CS2 for my Mac and Photoshop Elements 2.0 on my Windows, if someone could just give me some ideas that would be great-preferably for the Windows version, I can get a truer idea of what it will look like on that screen, but I can work with the Mac if there's some special CS2 trick.

If you want me to post an example I can-please help ASAP! Thanks so much!

 

[theKnifeArtist]

play with the contrast as well as the brightness

 

[ChadMKIII]

play with the contrast as well as the brightness

Did. There's no sweet spot. I've played with all the 'basic' functions, like contrast, brightness, levels, stuff like that.
Its either the foreground looks washed out or the background is grainy.

 

[Tanya]

FILTER > NOISE > REDUCE NOISE


play with that for a while

 

[HIDPLANET]

Also check out neatimage for a quick solution

 

[RazoE]

you can also do filter-->noise-->despeckle..

but only use it once, or the whole thing comes out blurry..

 

[ChadMKIII]

Thanks guys I'll try that!

 

[BigSister]

Are they grayscale images?
You could try a Gaussian Blur with a fairly small radius, then use Levels to tighten the edges back up a bit.

 

[bluemax]

If its for a year book, then the pictures will not need to be of high quality, unless its a full color cover or page. If you're viewing them as a full screen shot, and its going to be a 4 X 6 picture in the year book, you won't notice a little grain or poor sharpness. Try viewing the picture as actual size in the year book.

You can use noise reduction (Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise for Elements 3.0) in Photoshop (I forget what it is in 2.0 and CS), but it smooths out the sharp highlights and you start getting that plastic looking or angel looking affect.

I dont know that neatimage will work. The version I use is customized for the camera and the ISO setting. It removes the pixs that are lit all the time for a particular CMOS, or what ever sensor the camera uses. The free version also doesn't work on the entire picture if its over 1024 X 1024. The amount of noise it removes won't be seen if you're reducing the picture significantly when you put it into the year book.

Unfortunately for you, the best thing to do when processing pictures is to use the original shot format, such as a RAW (for Canon) or DNG (Nikon) file and not what you probably have, a JPEG.

So my suggestion is to pick the photos carefully, size them on the computer to the size they will be in the book. You should also look at pictures from previous year books carefully to get an idea of the print quality. I think you'll find the publishing quality to be very poor in comparison to the quality of the pictures you are going to want to put in your book. Magazine and Newspaper quality pictures are no where near the quality of pictures you get printed at the store.