Using Adobe Photoshop filters to fix grainy photographs, both digital and scanned.

Fixing Grainy Pictures in Photoshop

Is there a way to fix grainy pictures in Photoshop?

Photographs taken with cheaper digital cameras, or scanned from traditional photographic film, can sometimes appear grainy. Removing these photo artifacts is not easy and sometimes it is a question of experimenting with different effects to see what works best and accepting that some blemishes may be more obvious than others.

The despeckle filter can sometimes help as a quick fix. Other methods can be used to deal with each color channel separately. If you view the alpha channels separately you will find that some of them are more affected by the graininess than others. It's worth trying a mix of gaussian blur on a low setting (0.5 for example). The despeckle and the dust and scratch filters might also help when applied to each channel in different 'doses'. After this you could try applying the unsharp mask filter to the image to bring back some of the clarity which was lost during the previous operations.

It all takes a lot of experimentation, so make sure that you keep a backup of the original pictures.