This posting follows the editing process of this image. It was shot on my mother-in-law's Kodak Pocket Instamatic on 110 film in 1988, probably by my wife, somewhere in Washington, DC. It has been cropped severely, hence the graininess and poor resolution, but it is the only picture from that trip with both my niece and mother-in-law. The original negative includes a large fountain behind us and a large building (the Smithsonian?) behind that. This cropping is so you can see the effect of the editing more clearly.
#1 is the uncorrected scan.
#2 has had the exposure, color, and contrast adjusted in Photoshop using its automatic tool. I used Topaz's Photo AI filter (default settings) to reduce the noise (grain) and improve the sharpness. This worked well, although something weird happened with my nose. I then used the new Remove tool to delete some dirt and clean up some artifacts that Photo AI created. I don't think Topaz really intended for their tools to be used on an image this grainy. On the other hand, the Remove tool worked really well. Unmesh (Piximperfect) has a new video on this.
On #3 I backed up and redid all the steps in #2 with the difference being I turned the settings in Photo AI up as far as they would go. I do not think this improved things (quite the opposite.)
Great post, Andrew. I appreciate your experiments and reading your posts about them. It gives me a place to start because PS is updating so quickly, and I feel I'm still trying to figure out prior editions of the program over the last 3 years. Lol!
Thanks for posting Andrew. I have been experimenting with the new denoise feature in Lightroom (in Detail panel) and it has done a great job cleaning up images, especially those taken at high ISO.
I wonder how that might impact your original image.