How to get rid of "moire" and clean up poor quality in an image

Above is the original image that I would like to clean up and get rid of the moire and the poor quality. Doesn't look too bad on the screen, does it? Well, take a look below at the actual closeup of the moire and poor quality in this image.

 There are several ways you can do this, but today I'll cover three possible ways for you.

One of the ways is to use an action that turns your image into a watercolor painting. I used an action called Watercolor Portrait Effect PRO

This is how the image looks after running the action in Photoshop. I like this action and I think it makes a nice watercolor effect on most images. It all depends on what you want to use the image for, of course. This method takes about one minute.

The second way is done in Photoshop using the smudge tool. I only did a portion of the image so that you can see the difference.

I used the basic soft round brush set at 50% strength.

This is how the image looks after smudging. Again, I only did part of the image so you can see the difference. You could follow up and better define some of the outlines to make this look a little more clear.

And the third way, is done in Corel Painter using the grainy water brush set at 0 saturation. There is no paint on the brush (0 saturation) so it just blends the pixels. Again, only partly done to show the difference. This method could take several hours, depending on the image and the detail you want to achieve.

This is how the image looks after using the grainy water brush in Corel Painter, set at 0 saturation. I'm using Painter 2018, but the grainy water brush is one of the standard brushes that comes in all Painter versions, as far as I know. This method could also take several hours, depending on the image and the detail you want to achieve.

If I decided not to use the watercolor action, I would probably prefer the grainy water brush in Painter, rather than the smudge brush in Photoshop. I think it gives a more painterly look. I know I would definitely add a layer above and paint in some more detail on the edges and eyes.

There are other ways to clean up a poor quality image and I hope to cover those in another blog post later on.

I hope this gives you some ideas on how to clean up a poor quality image.

Thanks for looking! xxx