Repairing a low-quality picture with Photoshop

Taking photos from touristic hotspots. A very popular activity for the self-obsessed traveler. Most people own a photo camera, as part of their phone or standalone. Most people also find themselves interesting, and like to share their whereabouts with others. Through Facebook, Twitter or other beloved social media people express themselves by uploading photos. A picture is worth a thousand words - The Dictionary of Clichés. But as much as vanity makes believe, from an esthetic point of view these pictures are usually of poor quality (which also applies for my own pics). Now I don't have to be a professional photographer to draw this conclusion. Take for example this picture.

It is a great photo, through its content. A very nice view of the lower part of Manhatten, New York City. The photo may even have some sentimental value to some. No problem. But esthetically, it is terrible. The horizon is slightly twisted. The air is very grainy. There is a distracting sun reflection to be seen on one of the buildings. And worse of all: the colors are very dull and mat. Most of these flaws are due to poor camera quality. Can these problems be repaired? Yes. Photoshop is our friend.

So let's start with showing the end result:

What has been done?

• The complete picture is rotated, so that the horizon is perfectly horizontal. This can be done by placing a guide over the horizon. The horizon may be considered as an absolute reference point - it is per definition horizontal.
• With the horizon fixed, the corners of the image become distorted. This may be natural, or a camera lens flaw. Either way, it can be fixed with the Photoshop Warp tool (or Distort tool, but I prefer Warp because it allows you to control the edges individually).
• The picture contains a distracting sunlight reflection on a building. This can be removed by for example applying a clone stamp tool. In this specific case however, there is a better option. Since the picture is taken from the Empire State Building, there are millions of similar pictures available on the web. Let's just find one, and copy a patch of that picture over the sun glare in our picture. Since we are only working on a small number of pixels, this can be done without being obvious.
• Now that the mechanics of the picture are fixed, we can repair the colors. By adding a Curves adjustment layer, we can modify the intensity of colors. An automatic curve selection does well.
• We now add a Curves adjustment layer with a white-to-black vector mask gradient which covers the sky, so that the adjustment layer only has effect on the sky. By playing around with the curves for RGB and Blue, we can get the sky more blue and powerful.
• The same can be done for the city in the background, but now with the goal to remove that blueish haze (which actually is a natural effect).
• To taste, a Vibrance/Saturation adjustment layer can be applied to pump up the colors a bit.
• As a last step, we need to reduce the noise in the picture. This is a direct result of poor camera quality, together with the fact that we have increased contrast through the Curves adjustment layers. Let's make a selection of the sky only, and copy it into a new layer. On this layer, we can apply both a noise reduction filter and a smart blur filter. If necessary we can apply a vector mask which only covers the cloudless parts of the sky (this is where the graininess is present).
• We can do the same for the city. In this picture, the city far away seems to be out of focus. We can sharpen this first, and then add the noise reduction filter.

In general I would say that retouching a picture is a matter of taste - to some extent. Some issues are clearly caused by hardware malfunction (grain, distortion sometimes, sharpness). For these effects it makes sense to repair. Other things such as vibrance and color levels are less exact science. The sky in the above example has become more powerful, but is that how it would have been percieved in real life too? And if not, does that make this picture fake or ugly?