Rescued from fire: stains and discoloration

[timmy1729]

My wife let me scan a few pics that she saved when her house burned down the year before we met. There is a lot of staining and discoloration with some having patterns of discoloration. I have tried Katrin Eismann's book and the rbstains.pdf going around, but everything I do seems to make these worse and not better. On the one with the big house, I can get a channel that makes a great B&W, so should I just use that and hand color it back? I'm going to do that and see how it turns out. I converted it to LAB and CMYK to see if there was any hope lying in those channels and, while I had the Cyan channel up, the wife came in and said she liked it because it looked like an old picture. So, I might just use the Cyan channel for that. The rest of these, I have no clue, even after reading these books. Does anyone have a technique that would work for these? When I tried the technique in rbstains.pdf, it did not do a thing for me. I tried it on the big house pic and the damage was in the green channel just like he had, but it didn't work at all.

So, can these be helped or should I just hope for some decent B&W's?

[LonK]

Recoloring would be a valid course, however, the damage will still need to be repaired first. I worked with the big house photo, painting (in color mode), dodging/burning, selective shadow/highlight, etc. It's just going to take some detailed work.

[lurch]

Timmy, if you can get a good black and white, you can use that as a luminosity layer. Then above that add a layer in color blend mode, and paint the stains away with color sampled from a nearby good spot using a brush set to color mode.

[Cupcake]

I tried the cute dog.