HELP red noise in underexposed images

[agilchrist]

My assistant just gave me her card of images from a wedding she helped me shoot, and she accidentally had her camera metering set to low key, and it was a cloudy overcast day, so a lot of the crucial family photos I had her do solo are underexposed. When I try to fix the exposure in lightroom and/or photoshop there is an obscene amount of red noise and grain. I can minimize it using smart blur on the colour channels, but I need to blur so much the image starts looking like a painting and it ruins the color balance.

HELP PLEASE!! any ideas?

 

[andrew99]

You could try a third party plug-in like Noise Ninja, but there's only so much you can do, you can't create detail that is not there due to noise.

 

[Overread]

Well (far as I know) the red noise you are seeing is call colour noise and yes when you lift the exposure in a very underexposed section of the shot you are going to get a lot - and as Andrew said where you just get darks and black details are going to be hazy or in the case of pure black just not there to reveal.
There is a good series of articles on this website here:
Ron Bigelow Articles
dealing with noise removal and control in shots - however if they are as bad as you are describing even with noise removal you are likley to encounter some problems with shots that are just too underexposed

 

[KmH]

Is your E&O insurance up to snuff? :hug::

 

[musicaleCA]

Is your E&O insurance up to snuff? :hug::

Ditto. :hug::

You could also try Topaz DeNoise or Nik Define. I personally get better results from Topaz DeNoise.