Improving a Photo: How to Make Your Photo Look Better with 3 Plugins

We have received this tutorial from Gordon Sisson, the author of two examples for the Coloriage (Love Story and Coloring old black and white drawings). This time Mr. Sisson tries our noise suppression software (with a little help from Enhancer and Retoucher) to make his photo look better. He shares his opinion:

"Wanting to test the new AKVIS Noise Buster AI plugin, I came upon this snapshot of myself. It is not a good picture and it looks hardly worth trying to improve. With my great faith in AKVIS, I gave it a try."

Please compare the original photo and the final result:

Before

After

• Step 1. Scan the picture at 2500 dpi, 48 bit color.
  
• Step 2. Select what you want from the scan and enlarge X5.
  
• Step 3. Reduce resolution to 400 dpi.
• Step 4. Call AKVIS Noise Buster AI plugin (or run the standalone edition) and work on the settings.

  With the Quick Preview you can adjust the corrections to get the best result. This is a huge improvement but now I am really interested and I want more.

  
• Step 5. Call AKVIS Enhancer in the Improve Detail mode (click to read more about the Enhancer plug-in).
  

  With the large display and clear guides to using the settings, you can easily adjust Enhancer to give excellent results.

  Following the improvement from Enhancer, I still had a fairly soft picture, so I went to the AKVIS Refocus AI plugin and applied a modest amount of focus.

  This helped but was still not sharp so I went back to Enhancer — and using only Level of detail control (and a little help from Lightness control) greatly improved the sharpness, detail and color of the picture.

  Now you can see there are still unwanted marks on this old picture. AKVIS Retoucher (photo restoration software) will help us.

• Step 6. Call AKVIS Retoucher and choose a Selection Brush to color the areas to be fixed.
  

  Here is the final result:

  

Noise Buster AI v. 12.2 - Free 10-day Trial