I love this snapshot of my kids and my husband, but for the life of me can't get that red out and make it look half-decent. I have tried making the photo B&W, then selectively colorizing it, and that looked nice. However if one of you could figure out a way to get the red out AND keep it a color photo, I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks :)
Amanda

Hi Amanda,
I usually follow Flora's tutorials and examples when working on a photo, check her posts out.
Anyway here is what i came up with:
Created new layer
Duplicated original
Changed to lab colour
Made Green Channel active
Ctrl+A
Ctrl+C
Returned to original RGB photo
Active Red Channel, and select > all. Use Edit > Paste Into
Used Levels to bring the rest of the color into reasonable balance.
Hope this helps, and maybe someone else will take a go at this for you.

Wayne

Hi Amanda

Welcome aboard! The expression on the little tyke is awesome.
Just to add to Wayne's comments, the light is concentrated in the center one third of the photo. It also has a red flare right in the middle. What Wayne has done is fine. I simply duped the layer and did a levels adjustment in the Red/Green/Blue. I then went to Image/Adjustments/Selective Color and on Reds, moved the Black slider all the way to the right. The image has too much wasted space. Crop tightly.
The image needs to have a gradient fill on both the left and right side. Not my forte. Maybe someone else can help with this.

Cheers
Dave

Amanda,
Sorry, in the lab mode, select the lightness channel instead of Green (there is no green)
Let me know if this helps
Wayne

I made a copy of the Red channel (the one with the damage) as another image and worked on it there -- I also made a copy of the Lightness channel from LAB mode and used that at one point as mentioned below. In the new grayscale red-channel-only image, I used a masked Levels adjustment layer to get the damaged band to match the others as nearly as possible. This made the faces a bit blotchy so I brought in the Lightness layer mentioned before, tweaked that with Curves to make it darker/more contrasty, and then used a layer mask to have that at middling opacity over the face areas only, then merged and did some dodging and burning to finish off. Then copied that image (i.e. the corrected Red channel) and pasted it over the original Red channel. I had to do just a little bit of dodging and burning in the original Green channel, too, just to sort out a couple of bad patched.

Hi Amanda,

Welcome to RP! :pleased:

Great Babies you have!!! :happy:

Here is my try.... I'm in a big hurry right now, but I'll post a description of what I did later today....

:wavey:

made a rough selection around the red zone. opened curves dialog box adjusted the red channel until the kids looked right. this was to much for some of the selection (the mans shirt) and not enough for the couch. clone stamp on the couch and a low opacity history brush on the shirt. then appied a curves adjustment layer on the whole picture.

Great one Flora (as usual).

My effort was just playing with the red channel (with PSP it's actually a separate image, so I could use layers and also vary the layer opacity). I painted over the problem areas with a black brush of various opacities, then did a bit of colour correction on the final image (unfortunately, don't have too much time to play with this one).

I do allot of these unfortunately....

-Always start with Control J (duplicate layer)
-Made a VERY rough selection in the middle.
-Applied selective color twice to red only, adding cyan.
-Erased back at either 100 or 50 % to bring back skin tones that turned greyish.
-Used sponge tool to get rid of leftover red in the blacks and whites (boys hair, shirt, mans shirt)
-Brush in Overlay a little cyan where red still showed a little (at top in blanket)
-Color Balance - Added red and yellow to overall image cuz it is wayyy too cyan to begin with.
-Did one last final selective color to get rid of final hints of red in the middle.
-Erased back a little more red in the skin tones.

Voila.

Hi Everybody,

BigAl,

Thanks for your kindness!! :happy:

Amanda,

sorry for getting back to this so late ....

What I did here is:
Duplicated the Background Layer (for comparison)
Loosely selecetd around the red discoloration and strongly feathered the selection (10 pixels)
Opened the Channels Palette and activated the Red Channel.
Tip: After activating a Channel to work on it, click on the ~ key to have the composite view... this allows you to work on the individual Channels seeing immediately the overall effect of you corrections!
Run Image>Apply Image:

Source Channel : Red
Target Channel : Red
Blending : Multiply
Opacity : 100%
Deselected. (Ctrl+D)
This strongly reduced the reddish streak without turning the babies' skin too cyan, but it still left some reddish spots on the big boy's shirt and under his left leg. To remove it, I did the following:
Working on the Red Channel (still active), with a very soft brush (Opacity 10-70%) I painted Black on the reddish spots and white on the spots that in the process had become a bit too Cyan....
Be very careful when working on the Channels directly .... it can become very messy trying to correct a mistake there.... What I did at the beginning was duplicate each single Channel so, if I made a mistake I could copy it back and start from anew....

After this I run the image through Neat Image (http://www.neatimage.com/download.html) (soft setting) to minimize the noise and finished the resoration by creating empty Layers (Blendings: Overlay, Soft Light and Color) and with a soft brush Black/White or sampled Colour selectively enhanced or corrected different parts of the picture.

Hope this helps...

:wavey:

Flora,
Thank you, I was looking forward to your instructions! I'm off to try this out. Thank you all for helping, I absolutely love this photo and thought it was a shame that it was streaked.

Amanda

Im sorry I don;t have anythign to really add about this photo, not that I need to with Flora having been here - lol. I just wanted to say..

Flora,
You are an absolute genuis. I mean just - absolutely! I pray that I may some day match your talent... Seriously, you want an understudy? (haha)

Dawn.

BTW - that IS indeed a great pic!