Old photo needs some help

[Shoff]

This is the original photo. When I was messing around with it all I did was, levels and curves. Overall the photo came out nice. Not much else I really needed to do. The only problem I had was there was now a blue tint in the shadows. Can someone play around with this and let me know what you did?

Thanx
Steve

[Leah]

Levels adjustment layer -- adjusted RGB channels individually.
Curves adjustment layer -- used the auto setting as that seemed to work best.

I think the blue area under the chair is actually a small stain on the original photograph. To get rid of it:

Channel mixer adjustment layer (monochrome) 50% Red, 50% Green (since most of the stain was in the Blue channel).
Then a little bit of cloning just around the area where the texture of the stain was still visible.

Convert to greyscale and either leave as a monochrome image or switch to duotone mode and apply a sepia toning tritone, according to preference.

[Shoff]

Thanx, Question? Why when I'm cloning does it not use the color I selected. It's changing the cloned part to a blue even though I sampled a black or dark area?

[Leah]

I don't know. It doesn't do that for me but I know that others have reported the same problem. What layers do you have in what order, and which layer are you cloning from (or is Use All Layers checked?) and to?

In the case of this particular image you could always do everything apart from the cloning, then flatten and then do the cloning, but that's not going to be viable for many images so it would be good to get to the bottom of the problem.

[Shoff]

I did exactly what you did. The only thing I added was Duplicate layer.

1. Duplicate layer
2. Levels
3. Curves
4. Channel mixer

The started to clone off the duplicate layer.
No matter what I sampled the color came out different shades of blue. This has happened to me several times on different photos. Is it a layer thing?

Found the problem. I had "all layers" checked

[Vikki]

Your best bet is to remove all the color from the image, and then bring in the Sepia tones.
Try this:
• Duplicate the background layer
• Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, leaving the default setting to "Master", move the "Saturation" slider all the way to the left (-100).
• Change the adjustment layer's blend mode to "Color" (This keeps the tonal values of the image).
• On your layers palette, click on the "F" (filters) button, and select "Color Overlay".
Change the blend mode to "Color". Click on the color box and change the RGB values to: R 161, G 139, B 100.
It should look almost identical to your original, minus the blue shadows.

[Duv]

I love the general tone of the image. The changes were limited to Selective Colors and reducing slightly the blues and cyans.

Cheers
Dave