Cleaning Bad Quality Caps
As seen on Feel MB.
This is the method I normally use on my icons if I'm using screen caps that aren't very good in the quality department. It isn't the only method out there, and it may not be the best. But I find it does me a favour in iconing.
Onto the tutorial.
Let's start with this screen cap of Hayner from KH2:
You can see that there's a fair bit of dithering. But we can fix that :)
All you need to do is grab the smudge tool and set it to a soft brush at any size you want (makes sure it's the right size for whatever it is you're working on). Then, zoom into your image and VERY carefully smudge any dithered areas. Like so:
Take your time on this part, because you can accidentally smudge too much and end up having a really blurry image. You may also need to alternate between different brush sizes for different areas. Use a variety of short and long strokes and zoom out every now and again to make sure you're not over-smudging (and also to have a look at whether you need to smudge a little more).
Once you've finished, your cap should look a little better. Mine now looks like this:
You have to agree that it looks much better now. I also did a guassian blur on it, set the blurred layer to screen and lowered the opacity. This makes it brighter and slightly clearer to see.
Additional Steps
Go to Image > Adjustments > Auto Contrast to make your image nice and contrasty. This doesn't complement EVERY image but it can work wonders on some :)
I hope that helps even just a little bit. I'm not sure how well this method works with larger images, but for iconing it can become very handy. These icons are all examples of images/caps that I've cleaned up:
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