even out solid blacks

[jd3wolfe]

I'm still working on this pic. I always have problems with the solid black areas like on the suits. I can never seem to even them out without losing detail. What's the best to tackle this? Does this happen from the scanning?
TIA

[mistermonday]

A scanner with a high dynamic range is important because most scanner have a large drop-off in detail /sensitivity in the shadow areas. That's also where a lot of noise tends to be. To make matters worse, in this image the Green levels are high in the Highlights but low in the shadow areas that are black.
I would recommend opening the image in Camera RAW. Use split toning to adjust the shadows (where the color is black, not green) and the highlights. You can adjust the overall temp sliders to restore the white balance. A bit of noise reduction will help and then a touch of sharpening. This is the image as it comes out of camera raw after a pass over the gentleman on the right to desaturate the green in his suit.
A better scan would give you more lattitude. Good luck with the restoration.
Regards, Murray

[crazyfly1]

jd3wolfe,
I did this with 3 quick curve points. Create a threshold layer and move the slider all the way left, now slowly back right. The first black you see is your black point. Use the eyedropper tool and shift click on that point to set a point.
Now slide all the way right and back left and repeat for the white point.
Now delete the new layer. Now add a fill layer filled with 50% gray, set a point anywhere that appears black, that should be gray. Now delete the gray layer and make a curves layer. Click with the eyedroppers inside curves on the corresponding points on your image.
Hope this helps.

[Der_W]

I used the Jacob's Ladder technique to set multiple neutral points in LAB (technique can be found here: http://www.curvemeister.com/forum/in...ic,2056.0.html).
However I just discovered it on my own and am still playing around with it but it seems very interesting (used the L-channel in this case).

But this might as well be a little overkill.
Shifting the a-channel to green and the b-channel to yellow seems to have quite similar results.
Or a curves adjustment in "Color"-mode (pushing the green-channel up and the blue-channel down a little).

[jd3wolfe]

Sorry for the late reply but thanks for all the helps. I have a lot to learn.