I am trying to fix a photo (attached) with several problems. Many are easily fixed with the cloning tool, healing brush and judicious cropping.

The one that's got me stumped--and which feels ripe for an HP3 solution--is the yellowish-orange light flaring at the left boarder. Seems like this was probably the first shot on the roll, and whoever took it did not give the film enough of an advance leader.

I've tried playing a bit with RGB separations, but I'm not quite sure what to do with them once I get the red, green and blue channels. It is clear, as expected, that the best image appears in the blue channel. Is there some way to use this layer to create masks of some sort to repair the damage evident in the other two layers?

One challenge to getting rid of the yellow (my first shot at repair was desaturating the yellow) is that the graduation gown in this faded photo is, in fact, --- yellow.

Any help to this newcomer to Hidden Power would be greatly appreciated.

I used selective colour and a mask to control the area of adjustment, I adjusted the yellows and the reds. I didn't pre-prepare the mask, just made the adjustment to the right hand side and then began painting out the areas I did not want affected by the selective colour

Hi Phoenix
Welcome to Retouch Pro.

I’m not sure if you have posted this in the correct place. The help section might have given you a better response.

There are (at least) two ways to repair this. You could do as Cass has done above and as you rightly suggest you could blend in the blue channel to give the area a little more sharpness in the flared area.

Because the building is symmetrical you have another way to repair this. You can copy the area on the right and flip it and paste it to the left.

I have also made the grass a little greener

Ken

Sorry I didn't get notification for this...ergo the delay.

Phoenix1, I think you are starting in the right direction by looking at the RGB components, and indeed in this case the blue shows some natureal detail that you can use to rebuild the missing architecture. If you go this route (assuming restoration of detail is the best route), you would want to make the separations, then make a selection of the washed out area of the red and green components, and use those selections to borrow from the blue component.

I started doing this and quickly got up to about 25 layers. There are numberable other problems with this image, including dirt, specular highlight blowout, etc.. Another solution, and I think a good one, is to crop many of them away. You are still left with adjusting the blow-out, but the additional problems will be fewer (e.g., debris in the lawn). It gives you less to do and plants the focus better on the subject.

What do you think of the attached? It is, of course, not perfect. I think it needs a lot more work to enhance detail in the highlights and adjust the color...However, I am also wondering how important this particular image is...
http://aps8.com/images/yellow_grad_edited-2.jpg

I can go into more detail about the masking for repair if you are interested...

Thanks to the three of you for your helpful and creative suggestions.

First, this old family photo is not a "must fix or die." It did, however, present a challenge to fix a problem I see often, particularly in old photos. Since I am a new Richard Lynch student, trying to go beyond the nifty-but-unpredictable "Auto-fix" tools in Elements 3, this looked like a good chance to see what I have learned so far. [Sadly, the answer is "not enough."]

Cassidy, you confirmed for me that there is no real easy way to do this. Your efforts move exactly where I did not know how to go, however. I have a rough idea what you did, but could you be a little more specific about what you did with the selective color and gray overlay burn layers?

Ken, thanks for the tip on proper posting location. I was new to the boards and hadn't wallowed around as much as I since have. I have since learned quite a bit about my problem, in both the help section and from the "Similar Threads" section below my post.

I did want to see, however, if there were techniques specific to the Hidden Power tools and ideas, so that's why I posted where I did. As a retouching newbie and a Mac user with PE3, I found a lot of advanced stuff from Windows/full Photoshop users in the Help forum that frankly went well over my head.

By the way, I love the symetrical buildiing cut and paste. The more I read about retouching, the more I see that as a common solution. (That shows you how new I am to this.)

How specifically do I blend in the blue layer to provide added definition to the red and green layers? I do see that the blue separation would make a fine black and white photo, so my instincts told me there might be detail I could borrow or import into the others, but I don't quite know how.

Richard, that looks like the direction you took. I really would like a little more detail on the steps you took. I don't need all 25 layers -- just a start on the process. I like very much where you've ended up on the posted version. As you said, there are numerous other problems that cropping, using the clone stamp and healing brush and sharpening/blurring helps. I've actually figured a lot of that stuff out. Its playing with the layers that is still graduate level work for me. [But I love it, Richard, and Hidden Elements is a gem.]

Thanks again to you all for helping with my education. I've already applied a lot of what I've learned in other photos with fantastic results.

Phoenix, I have attached two pics which show my workflow on this one, the replace colour I got within the tonal range I wanted and then darkened it with a 50% grey filled layer in overlay mode upon which I painted the darkening with a low opacity black brush

Well I did several steps. But in essence I used numerous color and luminosity adjustments using a series of layer masks.

Again as previously mentioned this probably should be posted in forums/Technique/Help

Hi phoenix 1

everyone has his method of working,hope you like the picture.

sarbeka :happy:

It is not finished, just resolved flare problem. I just brought down yellow saturation in H/S, reducing lightness in yellows as well. After I did fade with luminosity option and darkened left side of the picture.