This is from a wedding that I shot back in the summer. Luckily, I had my good camera with me, but my daughter got some really good shots with her Cool-Pic camera. Not sure what happened. This camera usually does pretty good. Does anyone have any idea what I can do in photoshop to fix or improve?
ISO 3200 on a compact or bridge camera like this is pretty much unusable, unfortunately. The camera probably chose it because of the very low light, but the resulting noise and banding is very severe.
You can reduce the noise and banding with various reduction techniques, but you're going to really struggle to totally get rid of it without making the whole image quite soft. Here's a very quick example of what can be done, but even at web size, it's not got much detail left with the heavy noise reduction I've had to apply:
Some other ideas in a comment I just left in your album. Alexis did get rid of the nasty banding/reflections/refractions but as he said, it is a bit soft.
I would try to pull the perspective (those "diverging verticals" from shooting downwards) a little straighter, and crop a little closer and you get rid of that light to the right, and actually pull the couple closer. And if you are up to it, try a lens correction or pull the distortion sliders a little to correct the edge distortion. The verticals at the edge of the frame "bow" quite significantly.
I would try to cool off the white balance a little. I don't think the camera chose very well. One last thing, you might try to pull back the clipped highlights in the lights (in a jpeg you won't get much detail but it won't burn your eyes) and even deepen the shadows which should not only help more with hiding the reflections/bands but pull the interest further up to the couple as well. If the overall image looks a little dark after that, go to the HSL tab and raise the luminance (not the saturation) of the reds and the yellows some.
All good advice. I would also straighten the picture a little. You probably only need 0.5 or 1 degree to the right to bring the centre into balance.
Personally I'd work on a second layer with the view of reducing the glare of the lights and giving them a bit more definition, but this sort of thing can be fiddly and time-consuming.
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
You can reduce the noise and banding with various reduction techniques, but you're going to really struggle to totally get rid of it without making the whole image quite soft. Here's a very quick example of what can be done, but even at web size, it's not got much detail left with the heavy noise reduction I've had to apply:
I would try to pull the perspective (those "diverging verticals" from shooting downwards) a little straighter, and crop a little closer and you get rid of that light to the right, and actually pull the couple closer. And if you are up to it, try a lens correction or pull the distortion sliders a little to correct the edge distortion. The verticals at the edge of the frame "bow" quite significantly.
I would try to cool off the white balance a little. I don't think the camera chose very well. One last thing, you might try to pull back the clipped highlights in the lights (in a jpeg you won't get much detail but it won't burn your eyes) and even deepen the shadows which should not only help more with hiding the reflections/bands but pull the interest further up to the couple as well. If the overall image looks a little dark after that, go to the HSL tab and raise the luminance (not the saturation) of the reds and the yellows some.
Personally I'd work on a second layer with the view of reducing the glare of the lights and giving them a bit more definition, but this sort of thing can be fiddly and time-consuming.
And if you can't beat the auto-technology of today's cameras you can also join-in:
Just some simple and quick examples. It would probably help to start with @abirkill noise reduced image.