First Message & Restoration

[witscheyphoto]

Hi !

So glad I found this forum. I'm a photographer and am
always looking for new ideas in restoring & retouching.

Anyhow, I offered to fix the attached photo for my friend,
it's his Christmas present to his wife. I've never restored
a photo before!

The print I've got as a source is 30 years old and has a
really bad reddish-orange cast to it. Scanned it in as
a high res file. Applied levels & curves layers and the
attached file shows the result.

What I'd like to do is improve the skin color and overall
density of the file. I've tried selecting the faces and
applying a color fill layer but didn't think the result looked
good.

I have no idea how to improve the density of the file...

Thanks for you help.

-Robyn

[Alison]

Hi Robyn,

Could you attach the original file for us please.

Welcome to RetouchPro btw:-)

[witscheyphoto]

Alison -

orig attached.

[Alison]

Thanks Robyn

[OlProfBear]

How about this?

On a hunch, I used Image Analyzer (free and good for more than FFT!), applying Auto Color Correction under the "Special" menu, repeatedly alternating RGB Split Planes with Luminance Plane until no further improvement was visible (around 3 or 4 passes).

Then in the "Plugins" menu, I ran Decorellation Stretching (No to offset components) once, then Faded it in the "Edit" menu until most of the garishness was gone.

Finally, I used an 8bf plugin, AAA Multifilter, to Multiply the image (used the default Sharpness filter), and backed off the Opacity until it looked like the attached.

You could do the last step in Photoshop or whatever, as long as you can adjust the effect of Multiplying.

Of course, it needs additional work at this point ...

[Kraellin]

bill, interesting and nice work. i'm glad to see someone using things other than ps and psp on these. there's a large body of tools out there. i used to have image analyzer installed and did use it from time to time, but when my old computer broke down, i never put IA back on. you're now tempting me

[Alison]

Mostly fooled around with adjustment layers and masks. Damage in the blue channel and I had some reasonable success by spotting a cyan colour cast. This is probably still a little too dark, but I'm juggling bacon pieces and cheese for the pizzas

[chillin]

I’ve dropped on it a lot of curves, levels & the most impacting “selectively matched colors”.

[OlProfBear]

I noticed my processing did two not-so-desirable things: brought out a lot of ugly blockiness - I think it "enhanced" some jpeg artifacts from the original; and it introduced little "wisps" of inappropriate color, such as green, into the skin tones. Along with this, it either emphasized or introduced what appear to be skin wrinkles. Very odd.

Also, on further viewing, there seems to be the illusion of a slight haze overlaying the picture.

So I opened it in Photoshop 7 and applied a Color Blur filter, which ironed out some of the problems and did (I think) an auto contrast adjustment.

Of course, if my guess about jpeg artifacts is correct, the original scan shouldn't have that problem. At any rate, here is my new improved version ...

[philbach]

Bill I took your restoration and using Image/Adjustment/Variations in Photoshop I added some blue. Very nice work on your part. The original is on the top. Hopefully my monitor is calibrated ok.

Phil

[Cassidy]

Tackled this by using a slight gaussian blur on the blue channel. Did a levels adjustment brightening up the midtones. Using hue/saturation/lightness adjusted the yellows, greens and reds. A further levels adjustment, a bit of cloning out of bright blue spots and finally a very tiny orange photo filter.

[witscheyphoto]

Cassidy, Phil, Bill, Chillin & Allison --- WOW WOW, thanks for all your work and
ideas. Going to spend some more time with the image this weekend and will
post my final...

Off to photograph Christmas festivities in my town.

-Robyn

[Mining Art]

I did a repaint. Changed the tee to a brown so the gal would show up better. Toned down a few spots, but they still show a bit.

[OlProfBear]

Originally Posted by philbach

Bill I took your restoration and using Image/Adjustment/Variations in Photoshop I added some blue. Very nice work on your part. The original is on the top. Hopefully my monitor is calibrated ok.

Phil

Looks good! Sometimes it's hard to know exactly how to treat colors (especially in the middle of the night!), but I think you got it right.

[OlProfBear]

Originally Posted by witscheyphoto

Cassidy, Phil, Bill, Chillin & Allison --- WOW WOW, thanks for all your work and
ideas. Going to spend some more time with the image this weekend and will
post my final...

Off to photograph Christmas festivities in my town.

-Robyn

Look forward to seeing the final.

This was a great example of how much color information can be recovered from what appears to be virtually a monochrome picture. When I first took a look at it, it looked more like a badly discolored black and white photo than anything else, but the colors just needed to be teased out ...

(If I hadn't just been reading Ctein (chapter 6), I might have given up right then, but that provided enough inspiration to try.)

[Colan]

Hi

Nice work done so far on this one.

Found this one a bit to be a bit above my level, however here is my attempt.

Did a lot of adjustment layers then hue/saturation and finally a light orange filter.

Colan

[philbach]

Nice Work Colan. The photo does have a moderate amount of noise and you might want to reduce that with Neat Image or one of the other noise reductions plug ins.