Smoothening out patchy pictures.

[Rasheed Mistri]

When you have patchy pictures with a lot of film grain one needs to soften and smoothen out the flesh tones in these pictures. We generally do this on the scitex workstations. It has a smear function where the brush really is a combination of two brushes - a blur and a smudge - occuring together. Any way to replicate this effect in photoshop with or without plugins. Photoshop 5.5 had a impressionist option in the History brush which use to allow us to get quite decent results. The impressionist option has since then been removed in later versions of photoshop. Any way to get the impressionist option again into the history brush would be useful.
Thanks
Rasheed

[dave milbut]

<http://www.alienskin.com>

look at image doctor. there's a "Jpg Repair" filter that does a pretty good job.

[Burton Ogden]

Rasheed,

I am not sure exactly what effect you are achieving on the Scitex workstations, but for smoothing I frequently use Photoshop's Noise> Median filter in small amounts. I recommend you experiment with it.

And then, to keep the result from looking too "artificial," I frequently add back a little noise with Noise> Add Noise.

-- Burton --

[ninjasavant]

Here's a little process I've been using for years to enhance just about any (color) photo that I had that needed it.

1. Make a copy of the layer
2. Open the Image>Adjustments>Levels (ctrl+L) dialog and set the middle slider to a value that lightens the image and brings out highlights and details in shadows.
3. Open the Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation (ctrl+U) dialog and set the Saturation slider to +70
4. Open Filter>Noise>Median and set the value to 3
5. Open Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set the value to 1
6. Open Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. . . and set the Amount to 500% and the Radius to 1 and Threshold to 0
7. Adjust opacity of layer to enhance the photograph but not overpower it. Once you have everything looking the way you want it, select Layer>Merge Down (ctrl+E).

This may not solve your specific problem but who knows. I use it and like it.