mikedimples wrote:
I'm a little frustrated. I just spent all this time repairing this super-noisy photo and now the topic's gone.

That what happens when threads that don't belong get locked.

"Retouch my image for free" threads are not supposed to be allowed here. Yet, there are so many every day now, they've turned this forum into a joke.

And FTR, that image is way beyond saving. Why even bother?

Russell Lewis wrote:
Sometimes you just have to accept that the horse is dead and that no amount of flogging will bring it back to life.

I have to agree on this one.  You did a better job than most of us could do removing the noise, but its just not save-able (is that a word? lol)

Photons 2 Pixels Images wrote:
Mike,

Did you start with the hi-res or the same one you posted in your OP?

Same size. I just wanted to see what could be done (not much!).

mikedimples wrote:
Why? Because this is the place where we discuss new retouching techniques. What would happen if you were offered a high paying project from a photographer who needs some super-noisy images repaired. One never knows what projects might be coming their way, so it's good to be prepared.

I've been curious about the frequency separation technique that Robert Randall used to repair those ISO 1600 images in his portfolio ever since I saw them. Hopefully he'll drop by and enlighten us.

I didn't use the term repair when referencing those images, because I don't think they required repair. First of all, there is quite a bit of difference between the lighting you have used in your example and what I used on that job. Your exposure seems quite a bit under, so you would naturally be dealing with more noise than if you had exposed the image more toward the highlight end. Also, not every image from the job I did was shot at 1600, a few were shot at 800 and one or two were shot at 400.

Travesty mentioned something that I agree with, and that is if you need to deal with noise, make it work for you. One of the tricks I employed was in adding noise to mask the noise already in place. Breaking up a pattern of noise in the shadows, and employing the texture throughout the images, tends to reduce the visual impact of in camera noise. I added this at the picture level on a few soft light layers, and I also did it on the Detail layer at a later stage of the process. 

Ultimately, I think you are battling lighting and exposure issues more than noise issues.

mikedimples wrote:
Cool, what method did you use to get rid of the noise?

A combination of a lot of things, actually.

Some people dismiss it, but ACR actually has a Noise Reduction function that works fairly well sometimes. I used that and the Mask setting in the Sharpen function to get rid of a lot of the noise.

Opened in Photoshop. Did a dual separation. Kept the low freq at about .5 pixels and the low low another .7 pixels on top of that to act as a bandstop for the range in between where most of the remaining noise was. Then I did some simple healing on the low frequency layer to even out tones and on the high frequency layer to get out some of the remaining artifacts. Then I clipped a curves layer to the high frequency layer only and cranked on the contrast to bring back some of the definition.

From there, it was only simple adjustments with curves and Shadows/Highlights.

I just wish I had full size to work from. Might still have a little detail here and there to steal for cloning.