I'm glad you liked the approach that I used. I have another photo shoot that will extend from this afternoon into the night, so I won't be able to devote any significant time to this thread till tomorrow, but here's a quick summary:
1. Repair all the small but intense imperfections first, eg, the small areas of almost pure white and black pixels caused by dust or other problems. Among old-timers, this is called "spotting" the image. In PS, I typically use the spot healing brush in content aware fill mode for this, but I also will use the dust & scratches in darken or lighten mode if there is a lot of white dust spots or black image imperfections.
2. Try to recover as much detail as possible in the overexposed arm. I used the highlights part of the shadows / highlights tool to do this. Use a very small radius (under advanced settings) to get the best effect.
3. Fix the non-uniform dark tone that's lifting (brightening to a mid-gray level) the blacks in the right quarter of the image, and especially, along the very right edge of the image. To do this, I used two levels adjustment layers, one masked with a gradient to affect only the right quarter of the image, and the 2nd masked to affect only a thin strip along extreme RH edge. One wants to achieve a nice consistent level of background brightness throughout the image. This step should not be omitted or done poorly.
4. I made a quick, rough, feathered selection of the subject and saved it. Don't fret over this, a quick selection with the lasso tool will be just fine.
5. I applied Topaz DeNoise to the entire image. As I recall, I used some fairly extreme settings such as pushing the sliders for blacks and black point compensation all the way to the right, and the slider for highlights all the way to the left, and only then slowly bringing up the overall effect level to the point where it was just starting to remove the noise and further darken the background. I then masked the result so that the results of Topaz DeNoise were applied fully to the background, but only slightly to the subject. If I hadn't performed steps #1, #2, and #3 first, this step would have not worked anywhere near as well.
6. I sharpened up the subject slightly by using the anti-shake tool that appeared in PS a couple of years ago. I used the same mask developed in step #4. This step may bring out some more localized image imperfections / sharpening artifacts, but just paint black in the layer mask to get rid of these.
And, that's about it. Hopefully, I'm remembering all the major steps. If I think of any others, I'll add then to this thread.
Oh, BTW, ad hoc methods of reducing noise / grain (eg, based on simple blurring) *never* work as well as dedicated DeNoise algorithms. I own at last a half-dozen different commercial de-noise plugins, and select from between them on the basis of which one is most effective (and has the least unintended side effects, i.e. softening the important parts of the image) in particular cases. IMHO, once this image was prepared correctly, deNoising was not particularly taxing, so almost any of them would have worked well, but I picked Topaz DeNoise because I know that it quickly allows different levels of effect to be applied to the darks vs the lighter areas.
HTH,
Tom M
