Here is part of a picture I wish to restore, Is there anything that can be done to repair color on nose and bring back the full color of the suit? Thanks Neb

Okay, I am making an assumption (eek) here that by bringing back the full color of the suit, you mean making it darker and preserving the contrast.

Since the image is black and white I did the easiest possible method (in my opinion).

1. Levels adjustment layer to restore overall contrast.
2. Looked at the channels and noticed that the damage seems to be on the blue channel.
3. Added a Channel Mixer layer with monochrome selected, 50/50 red and green channels (you can play with these values to get something you like).

That's it, no cloning, healing, etc. If you like the sepia tone you can always add it back in when you are done. :)

Thanks Kerry:
It looks really good. What technique did you use to add the sepia back as want to keep it as that? Neb

Adding Back Color

Frequently its helpful on an old Sepia Photo or Black and White to use a color mixer adjustment layer to use the best channels to continue with the retouch. When done, to add color back I use a Hue Saturation Adjustment layer and use the Hue slider and the contrast slider to add color back into the photo.

Phil's way works great and gives you a lot of choice as to the color.

Sometimes when I am feeling lazy I use the color sampler tool on the original, unretouched over a white spot (in this case the tie has some pure white spots). I save this color as a swatch so that when I am all done I add a blank layer over everything and fill it with the sampled sepia color. Then I change the layer's blending mode to color and adjust the opacity to my taste.

I sometimes used the following technique to retain the "original look" to a restored black & white photo.

- Do the restoration on a de-saturated copy of the original.
- When complete, open the original and select Filter=>Blur=>Average.
- Sample this color (set as foreground).
- Add a new layer on top of the restored photo.
- Fill with foreground color.
- Use opacity adjustment if necessary.

The method retains the original tone but can be adjusted with Levels if desired. Below is an example using an image from a previous post. I only did an Auto level adjustment on a de-saturated copy and used the above method to add back the original tone.

I did a red-green channel mix 70-30--I think--used the dodge tool to lighten the teeth and did a degrunge. Used the 85 color filter at about 25% to put the color in.

dc