Need PS editing help with dark, grainy photos taken at night

cjonelc

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I took a set of maternity photos at night and in the rain with a Canon 7d mark II. The first problem is I didn't save my pictures in raw files so the jpegs are all I have. Most of them are very dark and when I lighten them to a certain extent they get grainy. I've tried to then smooth them over but nothing seems to really work. Everything looks like I'm trying to cover something up, if that makes sense. If you have any advice it would be helpful. Even if I can save 5-10 files I'd be happy. 2B3A3178.jpg 2B3A3120 F.jpg 2B3A3189 (3).jpg
 
hey there,
first of all make sure you save them as tiff or psd before you do anything to these images. Otherwise the quality will decrease with every resaving as a jpg. They will be recompressed every single time ;).
Then:
  • there has a been a lot of noise reduction applied - did you do that in post production, or did the camera do it?
  • your white balance is pretty off - especially under available light in the night, shoot raw (I don´t know if you accidentally turned to jpg, or inteded - I need to admit it happened to me too ;)). I have done a little correction, but left a little yellow in there.
  • Noise is something you can live with - see it that way - people are adding noise to give an image an old filmlook.
I´ve done two quick edits - on both I have added some lens flare in photoshop, added some noise back and one is black and white with a vignette. I tried to give it an older look - but if you take some more time, you can sure create a better old fashioned look using cross processing or whatever.
I don´t know if that helps, but I hope so ;).
20161006-(c)cjonelc-2.jpg 20161006-(c)cjonelc.jpg
 
hey there,
first of all make sure you save them as tiff or psd before you do anything to these images. Otherwise the quality will decrease with every resaving as a jpg. They will be recompressed every single time ;).
Then:
  • there has a been a lot of noise reduction applied - did you do that in post production, or did the camera do it?
  • your white balance is pretty off - especially under available light in the night, shoot raw (I don´t know if you accidentally turned to jpg, or inteded - I need to admit it happened to me too ;)). I have done a little correction, but left a little yellow in there.
  • Noise is something you can live with - see it that way - people are adding noise to give an image an old filmlook.
I´ve done two quick edits - on both I have added some lens flare in photoshop, added some noise back and one is black and white with a vignette. I tried to give it an older look - but if you take some more time, you can sure create a better old fashioned look using cross processing or whatever.
I don´t know if that helps, but I hope so ;).
View attachment 128428 View attachment 128429
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This definitely helps. I'll attach a before and after so you can see just how much noise reduction I did. So far on all of them it's a lot. All the ones I previously posted have edits made. I've used the surface blur option and noise reduction option. I was actually wondering if the amount of yellow was distracting. So that means the white balance is off, good to know. I would have normally saved the raw file but it was just a fault on my part.

I'll try to start completely over and give it an older look, like you mentioned. I feel like smoothing it over just isn't working. Thanks for your time!
 

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Glad I could help ;). I do like the original more in regard to the grain. I too don´t really like grain and much prefer clean images, but sometimes you don´t have a lot of choices ;).
 

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