Is there any way these pics could be improved?

[walterd93]

I took these with a bad camera,wrong settings, and everything...Anywaythey can be improved? Any editing welcome...Thanks Again!

[slipe]

I didn't want to put much effort into 640 X 480 images that can't be used for much. The shot of the older girl seems to be missing a color channel rather than just bad white balance. And the resolution and noise looks like it was taken with a bad camera phone. There wasn't much to be done for it.

Unless the cat was a beloved pet that died and you don't have another photo I would take another picture. You would have to clone out that shadow for one thing and probably replace the background. With the possible exception of Halloween photos you should turn the camera so that the flash is above and not below. A shadow from above doesn't look too bad, but one from below stands out like a sore thumb. It isn't very flattering for people either.

[creeduk]

Small amounts, of course unless you have the resolution available pronts will not come out well. Here is one of them, I removed some of the color overtones, some sharpen and removed some of the blown out highlights. this was a really quick fix, I was away and did not even have my mouse so tracker pad on lappy..lol) but you can see some improvment, the problem is lack of detail to use.



Still some mottle of magenta though

[slipe]

Out of curiosity I looked at the separate channels. The camera recorded information in all three. They are just so far off that none of my WB adjustments will make the picture look anywhere near normal. So the problem doesn't seem to be with the camera WB. The original EXIF is stripped and the image has been through Photoshop. My guess is that the image was modified before it was posted. It seems that even a 0.3 Mp camera would give more detail.

If there is an image you are interested in and you can find some online storage that will take a full sized image, post the unmodified full sized original and someone could probably bring it up to speed.

This is mainly working with the separate color channels. I added a little noise reduction and re-sharpened.

[Corpsy]

I took a stab at these. There's a lot you could do with the images, it depends on what you want to achieve.

The older girl was the toughest. The image is washed out in both detail and color. With separate images of the room and the girl in proper white balance, the color could probably be corrected by selecting and recoloring the different elements, otherwise it's just guesswork for us. The other fixes went for a softer look, so I went for sharper (though grainier). Typically with digital cameras, especially lower end ones, most of the detail is stored in the green channel, so I duplicated the channel, copied it and pasted it as a luminosity layer to get the added sharpness.



The picture of the little girl looked pretty good, so I just adjusted the colors to something I thought looked more pleasing.



The picture of the cat was very dull. I desaturated the bedsheet and removed the flash shadow to make the scene look a bit more natural.



The butterfly photo was rather dull, so I pumped up the saturation, especially in the greens. I removed some of the purple in the background and tinted the sky with a blue gradient. I also applied an unsharp mask to the butterly only as it appears somewhat out of focus. The picture could be improved some more by cleaning up some of the color noise in the leaves, but some of that may have been caused by saving as a lower quality JPG, so I didn't bother with that.

[walterd93]

Thank you all very much for your help