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midzki said:
It seems to be applyed something like color convert or tone curve, isn't it?
It seems NoiseNinja caused this problem when I used it to reduce color noise. I guess that means I shouldn't use NoiseNinja for this type of image.

petopeto said:
Maybe just stick to descreening for that image, to see what methods give the best noise/detail balance (and describe what you do, so it's reproducable).
I've redone the image from scratch with a different method and copied down the filtering steps I took this time (end result had around 10 layers). My goal was to slowly etch away the noise to make it as soft as possible, while keeping detail loss to a bare minimum along the way as well as trying not to mess up the color. Here is the end result: post #52232

Median 2px (25% Fill) << Begin to reduce screening. I set 25% Fill because I it seemed like any stronger killed too much detail.

Reduce Noise Str 0 | 25% Color | 0% Sharp (25% Fill) << Light color noise removal. Even though I had Reduce Noise set to color only, it still touches luminance, so I wanted to have it filtered a bit.

Reduce Noise Str 0 | 25% Color | 0% Sharp (75% Fill/Color Blend) << Heavier color noise removal on color only (this time no luminance is touched)

Bilinear Resize to 300dpi << I decided to resize at this point because Despeckle did better on the smaller version

Despeckle (50% Fill) << removes bright specs

Add noise 2% uniform monochrome (75% Fill) << Creates some dither and brings back some perceived detail.

Neat Image (0,0,0|0,0,0|100,25,25|25,75,25|HQ,HR,SE|Sharp Disabled) << Remove some of the noise you created while retaining most of the dither

Reduce Noise Str 1 | 60% Detail | 25% Color | 0% Sharp (Opacity 75%/Fill 75%) << Remove a bit more luminance and color noise with high detail retention

Copy and Combine Layers << At this point I am done with the main noise reduction so I just want to work from the final product so far.

Create Layer Mask with girl and smooth (untextured) areas exposed << I don't want to filter the wood and detailed areas anymore

Gaussian Blur Layer Mask 3px << So the transition between your filtered and unfiltered areas is smoother.

Greysctoration 30 0.5 1.0 0.3 3 0.8 30 2 2 near alt (50% Fill) << Smoothing the girl and smooth areas with a somewhat strong/fast filtering

High Pass Sharpen (Radius 2, 30% Opacity) << I went with a minimal opacity value on the high pass layer, but it could easily have been set higher to increase sharpness/contrast even more. << This brings some contrast and sharpness back to the image which was lost from the previous filtering. If you don't know what high pass sharpening is: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/high-pass-sharpening.shtml

Clone stamp to clean up the bright areas in the bottom left corner that didn't look like they should be there. << Manual work

I chose to use fill over opacity most of the time because I liked the effect better. The values for each were found by a lot of tweaking and experimentation to see what looked best.
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Note: I've left out some steps where I created layers and what I created them from. Unfortunately, I didn't write those things down, but you should be able to figure it out with a little common sense. It would usually be either a copy of the result of top layer or of the previous layer. This would involve merging some layers since I had fill levels set.