Girls wearing costumes of Bai nationality in the old city of Dali. it cost me 5 yuan to take a picture of them, which was worth it (coz it's cheep!).
btw i couldnt reduce the noise, workshops are welcome.

Here are my steps (Photoshop). I do not have NeatImage, but this sometimes works to reduce grain:



1. I duplicated the layer and worked on this new layer throughout the following steps.



2. I used the Watercolor filter, with highest detail, and low texture and low shadow intensity.



3. I used the Median filter to get rid of said noise.



4. I used gaussian blur at 2.5 pixels to get rid of more gaussian blur.



5. I lightened this layer considerably.



6. I increased the contrast by about 20%



7. The photo really looked horrible at this point! But don't fear! I changed the opacity of this new layer to 25%.



8. I flattened the image and converted it to Lab Color.



9. I selected the Lightness channel and did an unsharp mask, which actually worsened the noise--so it looks blurry. I did not end up doing any unsharp mask!



I suppose that to get rid of such noise in the future, use more light (as if you had any say in this matter!). But you can make sure you ISO is set properly. If it is too dark, make sure you set your ISO higher--this reduces the effort the camera has to make and you get a smoother shot--even if you end up with a bit more grain from the higher ISO. If the grain was caused simply by extreme cropping, then get closer (he said, tongue firmly planted in cheek). Good luck!

Hi Kourosh. I really liked the foto, and wanted to 'clean' it up a bit. The artifacts were quite difficult to blot out, even with NeatImage treatment. However, I think a 'soft' focus approach to presenting the foto might work (at least, it does in my eyes). It drastically reduces unwanted saturation artifacts, but it also diminishes some of the details you might want to preserve (e.g. the roof lines). Here's what I did to the original:

1. exported into PS7; adjusted the levels to increase the contrast; adjusted the color balance to favor reds, yellows, and a hint of green; very slightly adjusted the saturation

2. exported the PS7-edit to NeatImage and applied the default settings to mop up the artifacts.

3. exported the NeatImage-edit to PS7 again to apply a little unsharp mask treatment with the following setting: 80%, 0.8 pixels, 1 threshold.