colorize or restore color?

[cducasse]

Hey guys,
I am concerned with this photo, and don't know whether to attempt a color restoration, or just mode grayscale, and colorize it....

any help would be greatly appreciated.

http://web.mac.com/chris.ducasse/iWe.../Aviation.html
right click the photo, click download linked file

[NYBOB]

Here is my quick try.Color cast correction,levels,channel mixer.Center of photo is quite faded.I'm sure with more time & effort it would be a lot better.


Bob

[DaveS]

I did a simple levels adjustment seting the grey poin and black point

[Lasa]

Used the level eyedrop to set the black/grey/white points.
White was set on the her boots. Black on the back of his boot, and grey with pouch under jacket.
Love the look and feel of the picture!

Lasa

[Daviskw]

Good work all

I believe some of the color has been lost or faded. If it were mine I would recover as much original color as possible. Then if I had other pictures or I was sure of skin tone and hair color I would add color where necessary. More of a color boost than replacement.

Butch

[Kraellin]

i dont understand. is this one you've already partially colorized from an original black and white, an original color pic that you're attempting to restore or what?

if this isnt the original and you've already done something to it, then i'd like to see the original.

[Swampy]

Other than her red dress and some minor detail on the plane, there is very little color in this photo to start with. Planes are usually a silver (gray) color, so is the concrete. His flight suit is probably a sagey green/gray, boots black... I don't know, I'd probably convert it to black and white and clean it up from there.

[chrishoggy]

Used the 102MB original Tiff, and managed to find some of the colours
Took quite a bit of playing around with levels and replacing colour where it had faded. But only used colours that I found in the original image

[unimatrix001]

i used the control alt ~ command to select the highlights copied to a new layer and changed the blend mode to multiply. duplicated that layer again, merged the layers and used threshold to set a white and black point and this is what i came up with.

[chillin]

Some colors still there.
I’ve been playing with channels + iCorrect

[sunfly]

I really like this photo... it reminds me of that famous NYC V-Day photograph.

Another colour spot rendition. Converted photo to black and white, platinum toner, cloned cloned cloned, colourized lady's coat, sandstone textured on duped layer then erased off over the figures, flattened and cropped.

Sherry