Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson on Retouching Photos and for this lesson we're going to look at other things you can do. We tackled exposure, which is brightness, whether a photo is properly lit, whether the subject is too light or dark or what have you. We tackled color, which involves analyzing the photo from the color perspective. Is it too colorful? Does it need to be de-saturated? Is it not colorful enough? Should it be saturated? Are the blues the proper shade. And so forth. So now we're going to look at photos from the perspective of everything else that could go wrong and needs to be corrected. Here's a photo of some jellyfish in an aquarium that I took at a high ISO and obviously, no flash. So if I look at the image information, it should tell me somewhere in the EXIF information what my ISO was. Let's see: 3200 at one twentieth of a second. And I had a very low aperture, which means a large opening in the lens letting light in, all set up to try to capture these without significant blurring in a very low-light situation. The tank was lit from the inside and I didn't want a flash because it would just blind me because the light would reflect off the tank surface and right back at me. So this was the best way to take this photo. Unfortunately, raising the ISO essentially means you're turning up the gain on the sensor. When you do that, it elevates the amount of noise that the sensor picks up in relation to actual data you're trying to record. So you can see little bits of noise all over this photo. The best way to tackle that is go to Digital Camera Noise Removal. There are a couple of other ways of removing noise. One step which basically applies previous noise removal from your digital camera and then you can also go to Add Remove Noise here and perform things like Despeckle, Edge Preserving Smooth, Medium Filter and so forth. And that might be a good idea to just go through a couple of these. Let's look at Edge Preserving Smooth. We need to bring this back on screen, let it's thinking. Alright, so if I bring this back on screen, open up my dialog box a little bit, you can see the before and after. That Edge Preserving Smooth tries to do just that: preserve the edges of detail but still smooth out the noise. That doesn't look too bad. You can change the amount of smoothing down below quite a bit or not quite a bit. I'm just going to cancel that because I don't want to wait for it with this. OK to apply and again, some of these routines take a significant amount of processing power. I'm running Intel Core Quad Duo, whatever it is. I've got four processors in the computer running at full speed here and you can notice, it takes a while for this to happen. And if you like, you can Escape to cancel out like I'm going to do now. There we go. Alright, well, I think I will forego trying to remove the rest of the noise here with all these other techniques. I'm going right to Digital Camera Noise Removal. Here are really good routines and what you can do is highlight certain areas in the preview window before that are very noisy that you want Digital Camera Noise Removal to concentrate on and you can see the results in the right screen. Very smooth. You can control the intensity of the noise correction. Fifty is what it's set at. Connection to link these details to the size; small selected areas versus large. I can essentially turn off the correction because it blends it in with the original. So a higher blend means I'm getting more correction, all the way up to a hundred percent. And you can see from that, that's a little blurry and so I'll take that down to 70 again and then you can decide whether to sharpen in addition to removing noise, which sometimes is required but you can also see little pixilation occurring there, so I don't want that. Finalize my settings, press OK and now wait for a moment or two. This happens a little faster than the other techniques and we'll be good to go. OK, I think you can see the before and after. You may not be able to get a perfect photo but certainly this is better than it was. Certainly better. Now I can also move on to correct other things now that the noise has been reduced. OK, so that's noise removal. Turn on my Organizer Palette again and scroll down here. Here's another photo and this is my working file, not an actual JPEG, where I removed some noise selectively from the hood and it may not have been noise so much as dust. You can see when I turn off this mask, maybe very, very, very fine dust is on the hood of the car, but I used my noise reduction to basically blend that out but because I didn't want that to apply to the grasshopper, I masked the grasshopper. And you can see my layers over here. That's a technique to reduce noise selectively in a photo and I do that actually quite a bit. I've got another photo of my daughter, Grace, where I used a gradient mask here, which you can see, to reduce some of the noise through the depth of field effect over on the right-hand side of the image, but not so much on the left-hand side. And if I can zoom in here, you can see it appears here but the further right I go it's blended out and it's just a different technique and a different way of doing it. Alright. I think I better wrap this lesson up. I'm running out of time here. I hope you can see there are a whole host of other things to correct in images, noise being one thing and that's pretty much what I tackled in this lesson.