Lighting flare?

[lespaul36]

Hi, I am a newbie to the forum and to photo restoration. I recently got married and used some one-time cameras on the table for the guest. I have a few photos that are pretty cool, just need a little touch up, but one of the cameras had issues. Every photo has a transparent red/orange circle in the center and another (more yellow) oval off to the side. Here is an example

http://www.ellebellboutique.com/wedding/img007.jpg

I know that the photos will never been fantastic, but I would like to try to fix the orange circles. I found a few tutorials on similar problems, but none of them give very much information on what to look for in the adjustments. I tried quite a few times to figure it out, but just not getting it. Would love it if someone would be willing to do sort of "Idiots guide" for me. I would really like to learn how to do this.

Thanks

[lurch]

Here's one approach:

The blue channel showed the least amount of staining. In fact, the red-orange circle in the middle was pretty much gone there. The big yellow blob on the photo's right side was reduced to a light area, but detail still showed. So -

1) Add a new layer and set its blending mode to luminosity.
2) With the new luminosity layer selected, do image>apply image, choose the blue channel from the background layer, and apply it to the layer.
3) Still on the luminosity layer, darken the light area to match the surrounding tones. I dodged it, sloppily, but there are other ways to accomplish this. One, if you have Photoshop CS4 or CS5, is to make a slightly feathered selection, jump the selection to a new layer, and use image>adjustments>brightness/contrast, followed by healing obvious edges (The latter method doesn't work as well in earlier versions of Photoshop.)
4) The color image will still show the stains, but they will be the same luminosity as the surrounding areas so they're easily corrected. Add another layer with blending mode set to color. On that layer paint the stains away with a semi-soft brush set to color mode using colors sampled from nearby areas, 100% opacity unless you have to blend in several colors.
5) Since the corrected blue channel's luminosity isn't the same as that of the rgb image, color correction is needed. I used curves, setting the darkest black point to 15 and the lightest white point to 245. The color was bad enough from that camera so almost any correction will do.

[lespaul36]

I had tried changing the image to a CMYK. I copied the blue channel to the black channel. I then duplicated the portions that were messed up to the other channels and adjusted those to be as close as I could get them. I got close, dead on in one picture, but it seemed like a shaddy way of doing it, I think I am going to try redoing some with the technique you described. Thank you for the pointers.