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How to improve a mobile photo |
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 In this tutorial you will see how to improve a photo taken by mobile phone camera. Many of us have such pictures of may be low quality but high personal value. They rarely can be changed into a masterpiece but the some tricks can be applied that will make a photo better.
1. Open your image and make a background layer copy. I also was making new copies at every step in order to be able to discard some of the changes later.
2. First of all I wanted to remove the red cast. For this we go to Image > Adjustment > Variations. For the image used I used More blue, Lighter, and More yellow options.
3. There's still too much red. To deal with it copy the top layer and go to Image > Adjustment > Selective color. Choose Red and reduce the amount of yellow and magenta.
4. The color looks better now but the noise has become more noticeable. Copy the top layer and go to Filter > Noise > Reduce noise. Don't forget to check "Remove jpeg artifacts" box.
5. The color noise is reduced but there's quite a lot of luma noise left. If we reduce it too much with the filter the sharpness will go off completely. That's why I chose to use the Blur tool and apply it locally, leaving the edges and important detail intact.
6. At this stage we use Smudge tool to work on the hair (this can be skipped, actually) and on the areas that have too many jpg artifacts and remaining noise.
7. Some of the important detail is not sharp enough. We use Sharpen tool to sharpen fine detail like eyes and eyebrows.
8. I considered the background too green and used Image > Adjustment > Selective color, Green to soften it.
9. The face still has too mach red on the cheeks and some greenish cast on the skin. I used the Brush in Color mode to reduce red and green, taking examples of color from more or less normally colored areas of the face.
10. The eyes still looked too blurry for me. I used Burn tool to outline the eyes better and Dodge tool to make the whites lighter.
11. Final touches with the smudge tool to reduce noise and artifacts.
12. The skin was still too grainy and noisy and I selected the skin areas with 2px feather and used the Gaussian blur on them quite lightly (about 1,4).
13. Look at the number of layers that was used and at the result:
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Tutorials 
