Can Any One Improve On This Photo

I have this stubborn picture. Just wondering if anybdy can improve its quality. It is too dark on the lower side. Or what can I do to make it look as good.

Thank you all

Yes i see the lady seems to have risen from the dead. try this first, filter>sharpern>sharpen edges, ctrl + L then move the left triangle a little bit to the right, the center and right triangle a little bit to the left, then ctrl+u and enter -7 on the hue. Try also editing the eyes of the lady by using a clone tool or any tool you wish just to lessen the black things around her eyes, she seems to have a black eye you know

This is a little something I call my "Magic Dynamic Range Adjustment". It's a little secret no one else knows about (until now). It will literally perform miracles on this photo (it has all the bad characteristics this technique works best on):

* Open the file in Photoshop.
* Copy the background layer.
* Make the copied layer B&W with "Image | Adjust | Desaturate" (optionally you can use a copy of the lab mode brightness channel which is too involved to explain here).
* Make a negative image with "Image | Adjust | Inverse".
* Set the Layer property to "Soft Light".

Voila--details in the dark are brought out, and no more vignette effect. You MAY need to back off the saturation a bit with "Image | Adjust | Hue/Saturation", but maybe not.

But that's just the beginning of the miracles. The next thing you'll need to do is flatten the layers, then enlarge the picture at least 2X. Simply enlarging the picture does amazing things for bringing out detail. It can't invent detail that isn't there (this isn't a spy movie), but it will smooth small jagged detail, and give the appearance of finer detail, especially for printing. After that, do sharpening on the EDGES ONLY (a fairly involved technique which you can probably find described on the internet), which have been copied to a new layer. Next, perform a median noise filter on the whole picture (underneath the layer with sharpened edges), just enough to remove jpeg artifacting and other noise--without regard to sharpness. Now, with your sharpened edges layer on top of that, set the opacity of the sharp layer so that you have an optimal image--smooth areas of consistent tone without artifacts, and sharp detail.

One more general tip: whenver you do anything that increases sharpness or contrast, do it only on the luminance channel, not the color channels (to do this make a copy of the regular layer, and set it's layer property to "Luminance"). But whenever you do anything that DEcreases detail (such as gaussian blur or median), do it on the whole image as you would normally.

As they say, if you improve s***t, you just have improved s***t. (You can't turn a crappy photo into an award-winner.) But you really will be amazed at how MUCH improved the s***t is!

One more technique, somewhat similar to my magic dynamic range adjuster, that works especially well for removing vignetting (but not for extracting fine detail from dark areas). It's the old concept of "Contrast Masking" from analog photography. Here's how:

* Open the file in Photoshop.
* Copy the background layer.
* Make the copied layer B&W with "Image | Adjust | Desaturate".
* Invert the colors with "Image | Adjust | Inverse".
* Set the layer property to "Overlay".
* Perform a Gaussian Blur with "Filters | Blur | Gaussian" (experiment with pixel radius from 10 to 90 depending on your picture resolution and...watch for edge highlighting, which you want to minimize by increasing blur radius).

My method is a little simpler and much more universally effective. And if you like that idea then buy my book on digital photography (when it's published, and whenever I get around to writing it)...

Good luck...James

I applied the stuff I told you about, out of my own curiosity to see if it would work on a picture this bad and so highly compressed. Even more and really horrible JPEG artifacting came out in the process (not just in sharpening, but in the first and most important step too). So to mitigate that I did my standard process of adding a tiny bit of noise, and giving it a slight "soft focus" effect (basically blurring the artifacts away a bit more). Again, it's still just "improved s***t", but I'd bet the fixed picture has succeeded in looking more like you (or whoever it is) and the actual room--which is the main goal--and secondarily, arguably a little less objectoinable (which is usually impossible)...

Well, it's a really bad pic but I went and had a go at it for a few minutes.

Here's what I did, see if you'll like it

There isn't much you can do for this picture... but here are some suggestions

1. Make it smaller.
2. Change the colouration, saturation and hue of her face ONLY.

Please see attachment

I didn't realize this was an old thread until after I had played around with the image. Oh well. I'm going to submit it anyway.

EZ

Here's my attempt at improvement, Use quick mask and gradient to change darkness and tones in selected areas.

Nice job mrsflash, it looks really good, but this thread is 6 months old

I think he should have sorted his problem by now!