[Summerleft]

I just borrowed OH's free PC format disc lol

It has a couple of programs on it one called digital photo enhancer, apparently specific to removing noise and enhancing pics

Second a nifty little program for removing wires, atennas etc from shots called wire pilot, looks to just be working on the cloning tool leaves somes dots if your not careful though

Heres one i tried with the Photo enhancer not quite sure on it, i really need a pic with lots of noise , i think it needs a fair bit of time tweaking

before

After


the site for the above is Multimedia, Graphics, Video and DVD authoring systems for creative users

[silkstone]

I'm not sure the Photo Enhancer has really done what you need there. It has increased the lightness throughout the image, including in the sky and lighter tones which were OK as they were, so you've lost detail and blown some of the highlights.

The main thing you need for a shot like that is to boost the shadows and darker tones a little, but leave the lighter tones alone. Many image editors have a filter for that built in, but you can do it by playing with the curves to create a slight reverse-S curve instead of a straight line.

Some selective saturation increase could help too, to increase the saturation of the (red) brickwork whilst leaving the green alone. Again you should be able to do that with the HSL function of something like Paint Shop pro or Photoshop, though unfortunately not The Gimp because that only lets you select the six 'primary' colours rather than allowing you to feather off the effect, so you tend to get sharp transitions.

If you don't fancy spending £600 on CS3 , it's worth downloading the PSP XI trial. You can buy the full version legitimately on eBay for less than £40, and it really is very good.

[Summerleft]

Thanks for that, it is true really you get what you pay for, I might try the enhancer if i get any pics with bad noise say but i only had a quick go so mgiht be missing something.