Color Fade driving me crazy

[Kevin Connery]

Kevin, I suspect you'll find that the basic corrections will go very quickly once you get comfortable with color corrections and channels. I did a quick test, and the following--very incomplete--version took 3.5 minutes.

Unfortunately, what doesn't go quickly is the detail work, and "that's left as an exercise for the student" [grin] The detail work, though, is what separates the so-so job from the professional, and it can't be skimped on in Real Life.

Steps here were basic:

• Levels adjustment layer to maximize contrast. Normally, I'd use Curves, but Levels seemed easier for this image.
• Hue/Saturation layer to rotate to a good skintone;
• Duplicate and convert the dupe into LAB mode;
• Apply Image using Green as the target and Lightness as the source; mode set to normal and around 50% (That was primarily to get rid of the worst streaks, but it also put some texture back in the trees.)
• Desaturate adjustment layer, masking the jacket. (The only non-global change made--I prefer leaving the details until the end, to help preserve whateve image integrity there may be.)

It'd take me hours to really clean it up, but getting near is usually easy. I strongly second Stephen's suggestion about Dan Margulis' book on color correction; it helped me tremendously. (It's not an easy read, but it's by far the best I've seen on color and tonal corrections.)

[KevinBE]

Hi Kevin, thanks for your input. I am going to exploit the LAB adjustments more it really looks like it has it's place in my work flow. My war chest needs more tools that will work and save time as well.

Jeanie, thanks for your help. I think you are too modist at times.

[Kevin Connery]

LAB will do a handful of things well, and do damage to far more--but it's useful to use the Lightness when you're forced to channel blend, as it reduces the color shifting that would occur if you blended, say, Red into Green, or Green into Blue, or whatever. It still messes things up, but not as much, meaning the recovery from the side-effects of the desired fix is easier.

[Flora]

Hi Kevin!

...Just came back from a couple of days of something vaguely resembling a holiday ..

I saw you picture and wanted to try as well .... What I did was:

1) Duplicate the image and changed it to LAB.

2) Copied the Lightness Channel and pasted it onto the Green and the Blue Channels of the RGB picture.

3) Working on the RGB picture, I used the Levels to adjust each individual Channel until I got acceptable colours.

4) Used a 'Contrast Mask' to lighten the shadows (bringing out the trees details) and adjust the contrast.

After that, I corrected the colours with Hue&Saturation, Color Balance and Selective Colors Adjustment Layers ... I added an Overlay Layer to improve lights and shadows .... and lightly sharpen the gentleman only with the High Pass filter.