pdog182

Okay, you gurus have been a lot of help.

Gaussian, I have a pretty good consumer camera (sony dsc-p9 4megapixels). I get great day pictures and lousy flash pictures. I've never adjusted the ISO, i'm not really sure what it does even, so I'll give that a go and see if that makes me feel a little better about my purchase. Also, can I assume that you'd give the go ahead on purchasing Neatimage?

Mindbender, I tried your techniques with pictures under the same conditions and there is indeed noticable improvement. Destaturating midtones, highpass overlay, this is all good stuff that i've not seen before.

Thanks to both of you [righton]

Sorry Mindbender, this is a problem that has to do with noise, not with JPEG.
Take any consumer level camera and photosgraph with TIFF under the same circumstances and you get the same noise.
Jpeg doesn't compress the RGB channels separately, jpeg affects a flat image. The noise is caused by the quality of the camera and the ISO setting, nothing else. If jpeg would cause these amount of artifacts, then they would also be visible in this amount on any picture taken outiside with enough natural light available.

pdog182, yes, that is a descent camera but with all respect nothing compared to the top brand digital SLR's. These cameras can have their shutter open for several minutes without almost creating any noise.
But then you talk about cameras that cost more than $2,000 US.

wbiss

Great info both Gaussian & MindBender! [righton]

My results:
1. Auto Color Correction (Levels/Options - Find Dark & Lights Colors - Snap Neutral Midtones and 'play' with the midtone color)
2. Median Filter
3. G-Blur on both the red & blue channels

Looks good Wendy; straight to the point with only 3 steps without damaging too much colour or brightness information

retired_paddza

wbis ? I tried something similar but I still was seeing christmas colors in the hair I wanted to get rid of, which is why I did a hue/sat and some selective median to the channels. But your method is also a lot faster.

Gaussian ? You're probably right. Most consumer level cameras are default to shoot in JPEG and often it's impossible to switch out of that mode, so since I've always gotten the files in jpeg format, I guess I've just been making a mental leap. I think I kind of knew that, but was getting caught up in the nominclature. Yeah, noise is going to be a problem with shooting in lower lights even with a traditional chemical film or a high end digital camera. Part of the reason you experience this in the blue channel is that blue light takes up about 1/3 the size of the spectrum as either red or green. So there is much less gradiational data available, hence, less light makes more drastic contrast shifts. I guess if I'd thought about it long enough I probably would have posted different. Like I said, the solution is basically the same... shoot with more fill lighting or deal with the noise in the channels.

I think a lot of people get in the mindset a lot of times (myself included), that you can "photoshop it later" and don't worry so much about taking a good shot. Something like that was a spur of the moment snapshot, but it's amazing how many posed portraits I see with the same issues. It's always better to fix your lighting and dof beforehand rather than try to play catchup later. Glad you were able to find something that works. Yes, for a consumer level camera, those sony's are pretty good quality. They do have issues with shadow data though. To alleviate some of that noise, try turning off the flash and using incandecent or halogen lighting if possible for fill... the flash tends to really overpower the photo on those camera. A flash is only good to about 12 feet anyway... so generally it's not that useful.

Party on

wbiss

Great info, MindBender! I love that fact that you take the time to share your knowledge in a simple to understand way. You make 'practical' sense! [righton]