I don’t have time to be funny today but if you want to laugh and cry, listen to this Turkish (although sung in English) cover of The Beatles classic Yesterday. Please listen to the whole song, it gets better and better (worse and worse). It’s so bad it’s good.

Later,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Not published as per submitter’s request

P.S. If you have submitted a photo but haven’t seen it here yet, be patient and have a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios.

P.P.S. Oh, I almost completely forgot Detail Comparison.

I’ve always had a thing about grainy pictures. You don’t want to know why. No one I know seems to share this thing and therefore I’ve had to drill “grain is bad, noise is evil” into my head.

This brings us to today’s Photoshop task. A nice lady from Spain sent me a photo taken with a camera phone (two-megapixel Nokia 8600 Luna, if you care). Noise, grain and snow were all present. Yum!

After drooling over the photo for a moment, I knew what I had to do.
Fast forward a few hours and here’s the result:

My fixation wasn’t the only reason I decided to leave some of the graininess intact. Dramatic noise reduction often has the undesired side effect of making photos look like photorealistic drawings. That’s why you should never attempt to remove noise, but reduce it.

Use Detail Comparison for a more particular examination.

I also created a crazed-four-retro-pop-art-panel thingy while brainstorming.

Drink Pepsi,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Rhéa Nielsen <- She’s so pretty I shouldn’t have called her a lady.

P.S. Video noise is always, always unforgivable.

Do you have a picture that needs retouching or restoring but you lack the skills, time or software to do it yourself? Maybe you want to lose a few pounds, swim in turquoise water, vanquish street bums, say hi to perfect skin or say bye to bad-hair-life. Maybe you just need to repair a damaged photo or colorize a black and white picture. The bad news is that professional photo retouching can be costly. The good news is that it can also be free if you send your picture to me (rhyme not intended).

The catch

The only catch is that you will have to let me post your photo, (the before and the after), on my blog and include it in my portfolio. You get to keep the copyright.

Why it’s free

I need Photoshop skills in my job. I have seven years of digital photo enhancing experience but unfortunately, I don’t currently get to do it often enough. I don’t want to get rusty so I need to practice. This seems like a nice way to do so. Also, I just recently started this blog but after only three posts, I noticed I’m all over the place. I need something consistent. My Flickr feed is shamefully skimpy, too, because I got tired of uploading my own face.

How it works

Email me a picture using the photo submission form. I will send it back to you and post it here once it’s been retouched.

Here’s a quick example of image restoration and colorization.
Please click, don’t squint: