Faded Photo, mostly red channel

[Metakrome]

This photo of my daughter has faded badly in the red channel. Is there any hope of bringing back realistic color to the skin tones and hair? So far everything I've tried, while an improvement, is not very good. Or is it too far gone and grayscale is the way to go?

Ted

[johnnieB]

Ted, I think you've done a great job with the photo. Your daughter is very beautiful. I combined both of your images. I masked back in the red at varying opacities for the shirt, lips and cheeks, set to overlay, and then ran neat image on a duplicate layer and then reduced opacity some.

[bart_hickman]

The main thing I did was use the set black/white/grey points eyedroppers in a level adj layer. The white point target was set to neutralize the white on her blouse. The black point target was set to neutralize her pupils. The grey point target was set to the skin color from a flash photo I have of one of my sons--then I clicked on her cheek to make it that color. Then I boosted the saturation channel followed by a cyan photo filter because I still didn't quite like it. Then I did some NR (photoshop NR filter) and finally added an HSL layer set to colorize (with a mask) to make her lips look a more normal red.

Might be better off with some manual colorizing.

Bart

[chillin]

I adjusted RGB channels, color balance, white point & selectively enhanced colors.

[DCobb]

This is my try on this picture. Color adjustment, sharpen. Is the original color of the dress known. I have reason to believe that it was brown.

dc

I see that the original poster indicated the correct dress color was burgundy. I am posting a color corrected dress--may not be the exact color.

[Cameraken]

Hi Ted

Welcome to Retouch Pro

I adjusted levels

Red 64 0.47 255
Green 9 1.00 238
Blue 0 1.00 220

Then I converted to Lab and added a curves adjustment
Pulled up the centre of the L and b channels

Converted back to RGB and added the blue (clouds) background and a little red to the lips and cheeks

Sharpened and Neat Image

Nice Picture.

Ken.

[Cassidy]

Curves adjustment using droppers
Toning of the flourescent pink areas
Added colour to the lips
I am thinking possibly the dress tends more to maroon

[Swampy]

My first correction was in the Level's Options dialog (see screen shot). One click to "Snap Neutral Midtones" reduced the color cast nicely.

Selected the lips and increased saturation slightly.

Overall Curves adjustment

[albatrosss]

Thanks Swampy. Never knew that fix existed. As a matter of fact never went to the "Option". Every day it's something new.

Thanks again

[philbach]

Well to start I tried Image Adjustments auto color which helped quite a bit.

[Metakrome]

Wow, great response. It helps a lot to find out how far one can go with global corrections for this type of problem. IIRC, the dress color was burgundy. Now I can move on and make detail adjustments like lightening the irises, improving contrast, etc. The background color is not very appealing and I may try to find a better shade.

Thanks,
Ted

[jknox007]

Crop
Rid the Red
Sample Red and create new layer
Fill layer
Invert and change layer to vivid light
Add some lip color
Adj Brightness and Contrast +20 / -1
Changed shirt color by masking the shirt and changing Hues / Sat
Masked Background and chaged Hues / Sat
gaussian blur skin
Surface blur head only some hair to give a softer look

let me know what you think

[Nite]

Beauty photo =)

quality jpeg here

[Lasa]

Hi Metakrome,
Sometimes when I want to know in which direction to go i'll try the Image/ Adjustment/Variation... (need to offset the red with cyan one way or another)
Once in variations..I used the following settings: clicked
more: cyan-cyan-yellow-blue-cyan-cyan..ok
then used the HUE/Sat adj...Saturation +32
then a slight bright curve (pulled to the top/left corner a little)
Then ran a portaiture plugin (default) to soften the pixelization due to compression and feel of the image...

You can pretty much clean it up using only the color balance:
cyan/red: -100
magenta?green: +8
yellow/Blue: -6

Hue/sat adjustment: +20
slight lighten curve

Lasa

[tell]

Swampy's snap neutral midtones removed most of the red colour cast. Used the shadow highlight filter in photoshop cs3 to lighten the background.Softened the image using imagenomic portraiture an add on photoshop filter. Adjusted skin colour using new fill adjustment layer selective colour.