Getting rid of "splotchy/blotchy noise"

[Wolverine@MSU]

I have a number of images taken at my Mom's 80th birthday party (mainly group shots of family with her) that turned out very underexposed. I was using a bounce flash, and had to boost the ISO to 200 (Fuji S9000) and although they looked OK in-camera, when I got to ACR, I had to boost the exposure by about +2 to lighten them enough. As a result they are very noisy, but Neat Image does a wonderful job of getting rid of the overall noise. There is still a lot of splotchy noise, especially in the darker areas, that can be lessened with the "very low freq" checkbox, but there is still enough left to be noticible when I print the pictures. Is there anything I can do to decrease this type of noise? For some areas, such as a black sweater, I desaturate them, but other areas, like blue pants, aren't as easy to deal with. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[NITeam]

Perhaps it makes sense to reduce the image size in the very beginning, then it should be easier for the filter to cover those large-scale splotches. If the image quality is low then the large size will not be very useful anyway, while some reasonable reduction of the size could help better reduce that noise and still keep the print out sharp. The original pixel dimensions of the image may be unnecessarily large if the printout is small, so perhaps you can adjust that.

Hope this helps,
Vlad

[Wolverine@MSU]

Thanks Vlad, I'll give it a try.