Water and Fungus Damage. Need Help

[Generations]

Hello,
I have scanned in an old portrait of a family member that was taken in the 30's. The portrait was well loved, but carelessly displayed and then stored. The image clearly has been subjected to excessive temperature changes, heat and humidity and there is now a great deal of water and fungus damage on the portrait.

I took the portrait out of the frame and scanned it in at a high bit depth and a high DPI. In the scan I'm posting you can see the crisp blues and whites on the edge of the photo (where the frame provided some protection). I want to restore this portrait to it's original beauty but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to tackle the pooling, darkened colors on the left side of the portrait.

I certainly would appreciate a few pointers. I know there are things I can do with the color channels but I'm not familiar with color channels enough to get started with this.

Please help!! And thank you in advance for your comments.

Best,
Generations

[Tony W]

There are many ways to handle this type of image problem. The way I decided to tackle this was by using mainly colour replace tool and dodge and burn in Photoshop.

I am not too sure if the dark mottling on the left side of the image is the result of damage or if the photographer set up a light to throw a dark pattern on the background.

The first example was done using mainly colour replacement tool and dodge and burn on the curtain with a curves adjustment layer. There was some bleed of the colour around the hair etc into the background that was easily fixed with colour replacement tool.

The second example dodge and burn to the background and curves layer adjustment to get a little more colour and contrast - you could of course go for a little more colour saturation and even add some colour yourself.

EDIT: The bench on the right side is a little messy but I am sure you will do a better job :-). After looking again I am now unsure if that is a curtain on the left or part of the damage! If it is damage you could copy the right side background flip it and paste adjust density and contrast and blend in to taste - as in last image

Hope this may be of some help
Tony

[Generations]

Thank you so much for your speedy response and help. I look forward to getting back to work on this image in the next few days. I do think it's possible that the left side where it appears to be damaged may be a lighting effect used during the photo shoot however I'll have to inspect the original further as soon as I have access to it again.

Do you think I can manage to bring back some of the sharp blues and whites seen on the edges of the picture where the frame was? It seems like the background was more of a bright cloudy scene and less dark. In your opinion would I need to "hand" color that rather than make saturation adjustments to the blues? I haven't gotten into hand coloring yet so I'm not sure whether that would be a good method or not. Please advise.

Thank you again and Happy New Year,
/Generations

[Tony W]

Happy New Year to you too

As to bringing back sharp blues and whites as seen at the edges I would say it would be certainly possible to brighten them up but you would probably need to mask out the girl and apply a curves layer to effect just the background only. Attached a very quick try at a curve layer mask which may get you somewhere around your aim point (actually I think this version detracts from the main subject)

IMO the lighter edges that you observe may also be the result of damage. As you can see from the white edges of the original photograph colour has been applied possibly with an airbrush or even just painted on using watercolour paint. Due to damp I think this colour has spread and run (see top right in particular) and the one blob of white'ish that looks like a cloud may not be what it seems i.e. not as white as you think.

The colour applied on top of a B&W original therefore may have dulled down the original image somewhat.

You may want to try your hand at hand colouring after first converting to either B&W or Sepia. Not had very much experience of this so I would suggest you hunt around this site as there are some members that do first class work and are happy to share their techniques