Working with the Unbearably Bad Photo –Making Progress
You can use your image editor’s Curves or Levels control to correct this issue. I chose the Levels control in this case, because PhotoImpact’s Levels control allows you to do a quick basic correction by clicking the Stretch button, which automatically adjusts the image’s tonal range so that its histogram reflects a complete range of pixels.
Suddenly, our raccoon appears, with a single click of the Stretch button.
Now that we have something to work with, the next step is a Brightness and Contrast adjustment.
A touch of blurring at this point will help to remove some of the snow, or noise, that’s seen in the image. You could apply a heavy blur or heavy remove noise filter, and remove more of the noise, but this would also remove a great deal of the detail in the photo. When a computer removes noise, it basically has to guess as to what color the noise pixels should have been. Overusing a Remove Noise filter will result in too much computer guesswork and an image that’s lost most of its detail. I adjusted this image using PhotoImpact’s Blur/Average control, on its minimal setting.
