Clean up photos

[Trev B]

Hi! Can anyone advise me how I can clean up the background noise in the picture attached, please?

[firstdefence]

Try using The FFT Denoise Filter from the Filter Menu. Just tried with a small amount of success.

[NotMyFault]

Or apply a Gaussian blur of 0.3 px

[David in Яuislip]

Here are a few possibilities, it depends on what standard you require and how much time you have, it's always a tradeoff but a low Gaussian blur as NotMyFault notes is quick and pretty good
I have attached a tiff as the forum software will mangle the jpeg

StatueCrop.tiff

[Trev B]

Thank you all for your advices

[firstdefence]

Out of curiosity, how did you get the image? 

1. Scanned by you?
2. Scanned by someone else?
3. Photographed from a book, magazine or newspaper?
4. Something else?

[Old Bruce]

38 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Out of curiosity, how did you get the image? 

1. Scanned by you?
2. Scanned by someone else?
3. Photographed from a book, magazine or newspaper?
4. Something else?

I would guess it is an image from a book, magazine or newspaper. To my eye it is obviously half-tone screened. I would go further and say that it was saved as a JPEG with some slight amount of compression at some point, there are what appear to be JPEG artifacts in it (look at the sky above the building).

The easiest way to deal with screened images is the Gaussian blur method suggested by @NotMyFault.