Leprechaun'a home

[geoz]

A friend took this with a point-and-shoot near Cologne. I did a bit of PP.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi George,

I am guessing from the vertical angle of the 'bow, this was quite some distance away, and/or a crop from a wider shot.

I'm sure this is much better than the SOOC shot and apart from slight over saturation of the colors, does not look 'overcooked', well done.

To improve further, you might want to consider these ideas.
I am guessing you may have globally increased the contrast and saturation in your PP, if you can, I'd recommend applying it selectively.
There's a hot (white pixel) in the foreground trees that one click of a spot healing tool would have eradicated in a split second but I see you used LR4.3, so maybe that's not possible - a doddle in PS CS or Elements.
It needs some sharpening, but you cannot do that without dealing with the noise first, or overall, it'll get worse, not better. I would use Neat Image for the NR.
Given the P&S origin of the shot, it may be simpler to not sharpen the sky by doing it via layers in something like PS Elements (or CS) or GIMP.

Hope that helps,

[geoz]

Hi George,

I am guessing from the vertical angle of the 'bow, this was quite some distance away, and/or a crop from a wider shot.

I'm sure this is much better than the SOOC shot and apart from slight over saturation of the colors, does not look 'overcooked', well done.

To improve further, you might want to consider these ideas.
I am guessing you may have globally increased the contrast and saturation in your PP, if you can, I'd recommend applying it selectively.
There's a hot (white pixel) in the foreground trees that one click of a spot healing tool would have eradicated in a split second but I see you used LR4.3, so maybe that's not possible - a doddle in PS CS or Elements.
It needs some sharpening, but you cannot do that without dealing with the noise first, or overall, it'll get worse, not better. I would use Neat Image for the NR.
Given the P&S origin of the shot, it may be simpler to not sharpen the sky by doing it via layers in something like PS Elements (or CS) or GIMP.

Hope that helps,

Thanks very much Dave,

I did push the saturation to make it a bit cartoonish since I wasn't satisfied with general improvements on a poor image to start with. The original has much noise throughout and is not sharp. I still consider myself new to PP and am just getting comfortable with LR3. Gimp and Elements are next on my list and now I will add Neat Image. Here's the original and an intermediate.

[geoz]

Once more with Dave's advice. I downloaded a trial of Neat Image and applied it to the LR version then added a bit more LR sharpening and removed the spots. The noise reduction is dramatic. I also used Neat Image on some iPhone fotos with similar good results.