How would I repair this (snapped with phone)?

[GrofLuigi]

I know I need to get a camera and good lighting, but for now I have to do with a phone, and besides, the images are not intended to be artistic, just to show some things.

Having said that, the noise drivers me crazy. It's mostly at the edges/darker parts of the image. I have raised ISO sensitivity to capture more detail, but of course it just made the noise worse. And it doesn't help that I don't have good lighting and rely mostly on the phone's flash. If I put another light source near, although it's diffused, there are too many reflections. With the phone's flash at least I can avoid the hotpsot by tilting the phone. So maybe a tip about positioning the light source? I cannot build those boxes (I don't know what they call them) for photographing objects.

The above image has seen: Median Filter (lowest setting) > WireWorm (to remove some unwanted blotches) > Resize in half (twice) (because of this I apply Median Filter at start, it takes away some of the grain/noise while not reducing sharpness in the final image) > Auto adjust colors.

This particular image might have been saved with Riot (reducing color depth), and then I saved the crop with normal PNGOut, but that shouldn't matter.

So please tell me if it is possible to improve my work (without buying equipment) . I have tried Ximagic Denoiser, but it mostly blurs more.

Thank you.

[Jacal]

Just for the noise reduction part of your question, can you provide an original jpeg sample, I could try, what can be done with some more capable free/open source editing tools.
(If the photo is to big to be attached here, upload it to https://filebin.net/ or dropbox (google drive ...))

[GrofLuigi]

There you go:

https://filebin.net/0llabird2vg0sgpf

I put a paper clip for it to have something to focus onto. There are also scratches on the work table. I snapped one photo without flash, one with. I found out that it can save in png format.

[Jacal]

OK, I'll see, if I can do anything useful.

Years ago, doing stop-motion animations with my kid, some Lego girls and guys and a web camera, we have got some quite decent results using ordinary table/reading lights and sheets of white paper to disperse the light.

And, did you try with daylight, if you have access to it?

Be well!

[GrofLuigi]

There is not much daylight at this worktable (small window and partially obscured). I have very strong overhead LED light (not yellowish, not bluish, it seems just the right white) and a strong torch (flashlight) with a difuser cap, it produces really nice light, but I don't where to put it. Most convenient in terms of physical placement is the left hand side because I have a computer there.

Thank you